[schooltool-dev] School Specific extensions

[Ignas Mikalajunas]

Hello, as I had to set up 2 sandboxes  for school specific extensions
recently, I got some insights into this thing, and would like to share
the information.

Schooltool now is a namespace package, i will have to move some things
from schooltool.common to schooltool.core, but it works well enough at
the moment.

There are a couple of problems that are left to resolve, and I would
like Jinty to help me with them if he has any time:

version.txt file is still in schooltool/ not in schooltool/common/ and
i am not really sure where i should put it (i had moved it to
schooltool/common/ but buildbot egg packaging routine broke).

buildbot is using a different way of testing schooltool, that relies
on things like "version of setuptools installed on the slave machine"
which is making my sandbox different from the one present on buildbot
(I even tried using the usual way of testing schooltool, and could not
reproduce the failure). If there is some way i could help to migrate
buildbot tests and functional tests to buildout, i would be very glad
to do it.

As for the future plans in this direction - I am thinking of moving
schooltool.gradebook into a separate egg. Though to do that we would
need some infrastructure to test it in buildbot and package the egg
the way we do with schooltool nightlies. It would be a nice test for
the routine, and Alan would not have to commit to trunk. And would
like to hear your opinion about it.

schooltool.jelkner2007 and tizard at the moment are using different
approaches to buildout. jelkner2007 has a separate buildout directory
in subversion (jelkner-buildout) so you have to manage 2 checkouts
when working on it, while tizard has all the buildout scripts inside,
so you just checkout tizard and run it. I kind of like the second
approach a bit better, but before switching lyceum and
schooltool.jelkner2007 to buildout in the repository i would like to
hear your opinion.

Tizard is the bleeding edge example of schooltool extension, with most
of the widgets gadgets that a proper schooltool extension should have
which is - translation setup, generation scripts, a skin that inherits
all the necessary layers, a layer for views specific to the school
(While writing this I have realized that it is a good idea to add a
skeleton for unit tests, and overrides.zcml). So if your schooltool
extension is missing any of this stuff, you might want to look at
tizard and add something like that in your extension too.

So if you see any things that are unclear, missing or that you don't
like please tell me about it. I haven't done anything like this before
so it's all experimental ;)

Ignas Mikalajūnas

P.S. to try out the tizard schooltool extension (it has no things
specific to tizard yet) just "svn co
http://svn.schooltool.org/schooltool/trunk/tizard" and try "make run"
or "make test" if you want to see the single functional test for the
extension pass.