Re: [Hepserver-devel] Cannot get my HEP CVS to work

[Abe F. <ab...@fe...>]

Hi Wari,

Wow, nice bug report.  It's like a usability study, without the effort
of me actually watching someone use Hep and taking notes.  Thanks!

Now to address the issues you bring up:

> I'm not sure what connection means, so I added http://fettig.net as a 
> connection (hoping it would auto discover the rss) 

Not very intutive, is it?  I'll try to make this more descriptive, and
add a link to a relevent help page that describes connections.

Basically, you're supposed to enter a url, of one of the following
types:

http://server/file.xml
pop3://user:pass@server
blogger://user:pass@server/path/to/RPC/blogID - note that blogID should
be url-escaped, without slashes, so for pyblosxom blogs '/' becomes
'%2F'.

> I'm then greeted with 
> tracebacks, basically informing me that hep did not manage to create the 
> directory called 
> data/users/wari/messages/connections/http%3A/fettig.net/cur/ or 
> something like that. So I looked into the source and changed all the 
> os.mkdir() to os.makedirs() and that managed to keep hep quiet for a 
> while (diff attached). 

There are several problems here.  One, Hep doesn't check to make sure
it's data directory actually exists before it starts to create
sub-directories in it.  Two, the default directory, ./data, isn't
created by default when you check out Hep CVS.  And three, instead of
the much simpler os.makedirs() I'm using my crufty checkDirTree
function.

I'll apply your patch, and go one step further and get rid of all the
checkDirTree() stuff.

> So I go on again, creating a connection at the 
> Configuration page, hit the go button, I'm then greeted with a blank 
> textbox and a submit button, typed in http://fettig.net again, the 
> browser then hangs there. Nevermind, load up the 'messages' page again, 
> this time I found the http://fettig.net/ and it loaded the default 
> debian page that I have :) Interesting.

The blank textbox is where you're supposed to enter the name of your
connection.  I know there's no way to tell that at the moment - sorry!
(Actually the box is supposed to be filled in with a suggested name for
the connection, but at the moment that's broken for RSS).  Also
auto-detection of RSS feeds isn't working yet.

Finally, the redirect after adding the feed stopped working a while ago
- I think it broke with the Twisted upgrade.  I've been meaning to fix
it, but haven't yet.

> Subscribe bookmarklet does not work yet, 

TODO, once I fix the other new-connetion stuff it will be trivial.

> when I try to delete the old 
> fettig.net connection I got the page pointing to 
> http://localhost:5080/config/config/editconnection and I got the message 
> "No such resource" Go I guess I have to delete the connection myself (If 
> I know howto).

There's currently no way to edit and delete existing connections, which
is really annoying.

The good news is that I'm planning to work on the config pages this
weekend.  So all the problems you mentioned should be fixed soon.

> PS: I would still like to have the old style of viewing the blog entries 
> in reverse chronological order.

You can read all new messages by using the "New Messages" view.  I might
also add a view for "Today's Messages", or something like that, to let
you easily read messages by date.

Actually I've been doing some thinking about various ways of presenting
messages in the web interface, and I have some ideas for improving the
message viewer.  But I've got some other things on my list which are
higher priority.

Thanks for the bug report!

Abe