Open Source Love Day October 2010

On Friday two weeks ago, we held our Open Source Love Day for October 2010. This day was special in several ways. We strayed very far from the usual schedule for this day, there were several internal tasks that couldn’t be delayed and we introduced a “fun practice” event. But we eventually produced something valuable this day.

The Open Source Love Day

We introduced a monthly Open Source Love Day (OSLD) to show our appreciation to the Open Source software ecosystem and to donate back. We heavily rely on Open Source software for our projects. We would be honored if you find our contributions useful. Check out our first OSLD blog posting for details on the event itself.

The distractions

• A regular project needed an urgent cost estimation by the whole team. This was the last opportunity because of an upcoming parental leave to have the team together for a long time.
• Another regular project needed an urgent problem solved. This turned out to be so obscure that one of our developers had to be on-site. You can read about it in this blog entry now.
• We received several shipments of office furniture and computer parts. They had to be checked and placed in.
• We had a fun practice event. We discovered the online “game” typeracer and practiced our raw typing skill against each other for some time. Pro tip for beginners: don’t look at the highscores!

On this OSLD, we accomplished the following tasks:

• A new version 1.8 of the cmakebuilder hudson plugin implements several feature requests. You can now choose to NOT clean your workspace before building and set different paths for the cmake installation for every job or node (hudson slaves). The latter option can be applied using an environment variable.

On this OSLD, we also tried the following tasks:

• We keep an eye on Scala and its associated web framework Lift as a promising technology. One issue with Lift that bugs us is the use of “sun bastard format” properties for internationalization. We tried to teach Lift to accept UTF-8 encoded property files. After a lot of “downloading the internet” (you can always tell which project uses maven by their initial setup delay), we quickly implemented our own ResourceBundle.Control. But the Lift framework itself could not be built: “Error occurred during initialization of VM: Could not reserve enough space for object heap”. We ran out of time and will investigate in this issue on the next OSLD.
• Grails is another web framework we use in projects. There are some bugs that really annoy us, and the OSLD is the perfect time to fix them. One of these bugs is GRAILS-6475, which we tried to reproduce with the latest code base. After writing a test case that would go green unexpectedly, we tried to provoke the error by setting up a sample project. The bug didn’t show up there, too. We left a comment in the issuetracker and ceased development.

What were our lessons learnt today?

• You can’t tear off massive amounts of time from the OSLD and expect it to still be working. An OSLD doesn’t scale down apparently.
• Most issues that can’t be done fail with the project’s build. The build process of a foreign project is the most crucial phase in your decision on commitment. If it fails, your participation in the project is at risk. We’ve seen many brittle, undocumented and incredible complex build processes now. And we can state one thing: It doesn’t stop with throwing maven at a project, you still have to “think the build”.

Retrospective of the OSLD

This OSLD was special in the amount of non-OSLD work done. The remaining efforts weren’t as successful as we wished. This has been an ongoing issue with our OSLD for the last months now and we are looking forward to adapt our workstyle to yield better results in the future. The distraction by typeracer was fun, though.