FLOSS Project Planets

Review: The Hound of Justice, by Claire O'Dell

Series: Janet Watson Chronicles #2 Publisher: Harper Voyager Copyright: July 2019 ISBN: 0-06-269938-5 Format: Kindle Pages: 325

The Hound of Justice is a near-future thriller novel with Sherlock Holmes references. It is a direct sequel to A Study in Honor. This series is best read in order.

Janet Watson is in a much better place than she was in the first book. She has proper physical therapy, a new arm, and a surgeon's job waiting for her as soon as she can master its features. A chance meeting due to an Inauguration Day terrorist attack may even develop into something more. She just needs to get back into the operating room and then she'll feel like her life is back on track.

Sara Holmes, on the other hand, is restless, bored, and manic, rudely intruding on Watson's date. Then she disappears, upending Watson's living arrangements. She's on the trail of something. When mysterious destructible notes start appearing in Watson's books, it's clear that she wants help.

The structure of this book didn't really work for me. The first third or so is a slice-of-life account of Watson's attempt to resume her career as a surgeon against a backdrop of ongoing depressing politics. This part sounds like the least interesting, but I was thoroughly engrossed. Watson is easy to care about, hospital politics are strangely interesting, and while the romance never quite clicked for me, it had potential. I was hoping for another book like A Study in Honor, where Watson's life and Holmes's investigations entwine and run in parallel.

That was not to be. The middle third of the book pulls Watson away to Georgia and a complicated mix of family obligations and spy-novel machinations. If this had involved Sara's fae strangeness, verbal sparring, and odd tokens of appreciation, maybe it would have worked, but Sara Holmes is entirely off-camera. Watson is instead dealing with a minor supporting character from the first book, who drags her through disguises, vehicle changes, and border stops in a way that felt excessive and weirdly out of place. (Other reviews say that this character is the Mycroft Holmes equivalent; the first initial of Micha's name fits, but nothing else does so far as I can tell.)

Then the last third of the novel turns into a heist.

I like a heist novel as much as the next person, but a good heist story needs a team with chemistry and interplay, and I didn't know any of these people. There was way too little Sara Holmes, too much of Watson being out of her element in a rather generic way, and too many steps that Watson is led through without giving the reader a chance to enjoy the competence of the team. It felt jarring and disconnected, like Watson got pulled out of one story and dropped into an entirely different story without a proper groundwork.

The Hound of Justice still has its moments. Watson is a great character and I'm still fully invested in her life. She was pulled into this mission because she's the person Holmes knows with the appropriate skills, and when she finally gets a chance to put those skills to use, it's quite satisfying.

But, alas, the magic of A Study in Honor simply isn't here, in part because Sara Holmes is missing for most of the book and her replacements and stand-ins are nowhere near as intriguing. The villain's plan seems wildly impractical and highly likely to be detected, and although I can come up with some explanations to salvage it, those don't appear in the book. And, as in the first book, the villain seems very one-dimensional and simplistic. This is certainly not a villain worthy of Holmes.

Fittingly, given the political movements O'Dell is commenting on, a lot of this book is about racial politics. O'Dell contrasts the microaggressions and more subtle dangers for Watson as a black woman in Washington, D.C., with the more explicit and active racism of the other places to which she travels over the course of the story. She's trying very hard to give the reader a feeling for what it's like to be black in the United States. I don't have any specific complaints about this, and I'm glad she's attempting it, but I came away from this book with a nagging feeling that Watson's reactions were a tiny bit off. It felt like a white person writing about racism rather than a black person writing about racism: nothing is entirely incorrect, but the emotional beats aren't quite where black authors would put them. I could be completely wrong about this, and am certainly much less qualified to comment than O'Dell is, but there were enough places that landed slightly wrong that I wanted to note it.

I would still recommend A Study in Honor, but I'm not sure I can recommend this book. This is one of those series where the things that I enjoyed the most about the first book weren't what the author wanted to focus on in subsequent books. I would read more about the day-to-day of Watson's life, and I would certainly read more of Holmes and Watson sparring and circling and trying to understand each other. I'm less interested in somewhat generic thrillers with implausible plots and Sherlock Holmes references.

At the moment, this is academic, since The Hound of Justice is the last book of the series so far.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Drupal 10.2 has arrived and ships with several new features, bugfixes, enhancements and quality of life improvements.One change that might catch you off guard though involves List (text) fields. These fields store key/value pairs of information, designed to present users with a select list of options in a field. 

This is a lighter month due to holidays (and also I’m trying not to burn out), but I tried to fit in a bit of KDE anyway. It’s all bugfixes anyway because of the feature freeze!

Not mentioned is a bunch of really boring busywork like unbreaking the stable branches of Gear applications due to the CI format changing.

Tokodon #

Bugfix Fixed a bunch of papercuts with the Android build, and the new nightlies should be appearing in the F-Droid repository soon! It’s mostly adding missing icons and making sure it looks good in qqc2-breeze-style (the style we use on Android and Plasma Mobile.) 24.02

Bugfix Fixed Akkoma and Pleroma tags not being detected correctly, they should open in Tokodon instead of your web browser again! 24.02

Plasma #

Bugfix KScreenLocker CI now runs supported tests, see the KillTest fixes and pamTest fix. Failing tests also make the pipeline visibly fail, as it should. (Unfortunately, the pipeline as of writing fails to due some unrelated regression?) 6.0

Bugfix The lockscreen greeter now handles even the fallback theme failing, and display the “please unlock using loginctl” message instead of a black screen. 6.0

Bugfix Improves the QtQuickControls style selection mechanism to work around a possible regression in Qt6. This should stop applications from mysteriously not opening in the rare (but unsupported) cases where our official styles aren’t installed/loading. 6.0

Kirigami #

Bugfix Fixed a bunch of TextArea bugs that affected mobile form factors, such as Plasma Mobile and Android. This is mostly for Tokodon (because we abuse TextAreas a lot in scrolling content) but it can help other applications too! The selectByMouse property is now respected, the cursor handles should show up less. 6.0

Bugfix Invisible MenuItems in qqc2-breeze-style are collapsed like in qqc2-desktop-style. Mobile applications should no longer have elongated menus with lots of blank space! 6.0

Bugfix You can finally right-click with a touchpad in qqc2-desktop-style TextFields again! This bug has been driving me up a wall when testing our Qt6 stuff. 6.0

Feature When the Kirigami theme plugin fails to load, the error message will soon be a bit more descriptive. This should make it easier for non-developers to figure out why Kirigami applications don’t look correct. 6.0

Android #

Bugfix Fixed KWeather not launching on Android because it needed QApplication. I didn’t know QtCharts is QWidgets-based! 24.02

I also went around and fixed up a bunch of other mobile applications with Android contributions too small to mention. Applications like Qrca, Kongress, etc.

NeoChat #

Bugfix Prevent the NeoChat notification daemon from sticking around forever although that should rarely happen. 24.02

Outside of KDE #

Nagged for a new QtKeychain release due to a critical bug that would cause applications to never open KWallet5. Please also nag your distributions to package 0.14.2 soon! Anything using QtKeychain 0.14.1 or below won’t work in Plasma 6. This doesn’t affect people in the dev session, because QtKeychain should be built from git.

Helping the Gentoo KDE Team with packaging Plasma 6 and KDE Gear 6. I managed to update my desktop to Plasma 6 and submitted fixes to get it closer to working. I also added Arianna, PlasmaTube and MpvQt packages.

My work in KDE for November 2023

My Work in KDE

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You are rendering content with Python and want to show some Markdown, but you style your pages with Tailwind. With Tailwind’s built-in reset, how can you style the tags of your rendered HTML that come from Markdown? This article shows how that can be done. Specifically, I am assuming that you are working with Python’s Markdown package. I recently worked on a project where I needed to render some Markdown descriptions.

Posted on December 30, 2023

By the influencers on the famous proprietary video platform1.

When I’m crafting with no powertools I tend to watch videos, and this autumn I’ve seen a few in a row that were making red wool dresses, at least one or two medieval kirtles. I don’t remember which channels they were, and I’ve decided not to go back and look for them, at least for a time.

Anyway, my brain suddenly decided that I needed a red wool dress, fitted enough to give some bust support. I had already made a dress that satisfied the latter requirement and I still had more than half of the red wool faille I’ve used for the Garibaldi blouse (still not blogged, but I will get to it), and this time I wanted it to be ready for this winter.

While the pattern I was going to use is Victorian, it was designed for underwear, and this was designed to be outerwear, so from the very start I decided not to bother too much with any kind of historical details or techniques.

I knew that I didn’t have enough fabric to add a flounce to the hem, as in the cotton dress, but then I remembered that some time ago I fell for a piece of fringed trim in black, white and red. I did a quick check that the red wasn’t clashing (it wasn’t) and I knew I had a plan for the hem decoration.

Then I spent a week finishing other projects, and the more I thought about this dress, the more I was tempted to have spiral lacing at the front rather than buttons, as a nod to the kirtle inspiration. It may end up be a bit of a hassle, but if it is too much I can always add a hidden zipper on a side seam, and only have to undo a bit of the lacing around the neckhole to wear the dress.

Finally, I could start working on the dress: I cut all of the main pieces, and since the seam lines were quite curved I marked them with tailor’s tacks, which I don’t exactly enjoy doing or removing, but are the only method that was guaranteed to survive while manipulating this fabric (and not leave traces afterwards).

While cutting the front pieces I accidentally cut the high neck line instead of the one I had used on the cotton dress: I decided to go for it also on the back pieces and decide later whether I wanted to lower it.

Since this is a modern dress, with no historical accuracy at all, and I have access to a serger, I decided to use some dark blue cotton voile I’ve had in my stash for quite some time, cut into bias strip, to bind the raw edges before sewing. This works significantly better than bought bias tape, which is a bit too stiff for this.

For the front opening, I’ve decided to reinforce the areas where the lacing holes will be with cotton: I’ve used some other navy blue cotton, also from the stash, and added two lines of cording to stiffen the front edge.

So I’ve cut the front in two pieces rather than on the fold, sewn the reinforcements to the sewing allowances in such a way that the corded edge was aligned with the center front and then sewn the bottom of the front seam from just before the end of the reinforcements to the hem.

The allowances are then folded back, and then they are kept in place by the worked lacing holes. The cotton was pinked, while for the wool I used the selvedge of the fabric and there was no need for any finishing.

Behind the opening I’ve added a modesty placket: I’ve cut a strip of red wool, a strip of cotton, folded the edge of the strip of cotton to the center, added cording to the long sides, pressed the allowances of the wool towards the wrong side, and then handstitched the cotton to the wool, wrong sides facing. This was finally handstitched to one side of the sewing allowance of the center front.

I’ve also decided to add real pockets, rather than just slits, and for some reason I decided to add them by hand after I had sewn the dress, so I’ve left opening in the side back seams, where the slits were in the cotton dress. I’ve also already worn the dress, but haven’t added the pockets yet, as I’m still debating about their shape. This will be fixed in the near future.

Another thing that will have to be fixed is the trim situation: I like the fringe at the bottom, and I had enough to also make a belt, but this makes the top of the dress a bit empty. I can’t use the same fringe tape, as it is too wide, but it would be nice to have something smaller that matches the patterned part. And I think I can make something suitable with tablet weaving, but I’m not sure on which materials to use, so it will have to be on hold for a while, until I decide on the supplies and have the time for making it.

Another improvement I’d like to add are detached sleeves, both matching (I should still have just enough fabric) and contrasting, but first I want to learn more about real kirtle construction, and maybe start making sleeves that would be suitable also for a real kirtle.

Meanwhile, I’ve worn it on Christmas (over my 1700s menswear shirt with big sleeves) and may wear it again tomorrow (if I bother to dress up to spend New Year’s Eve at home :D )

1. yep, that’s YouTube, of course.↩︎

Read all parts of the series Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4

I’ve been wanting to write this post for over a year, but lacked energy and time. Before 2023 is coming to an end, I want to close this series and share some more insights with you and hopefully provide you with a smile here and there.

For this round of interviews, four more kids around the ages of 8 to 13 were interviewed, 3 of them have a US background—these 3 interviews were done by a friend who recorded these interviews for me, thank you!

As opposed to the previous interviews, these four kids have parents who have a more technical professional background. And this seems to make a difference: even though none of these kids actually knew much better how the internet really works than the other kids that I interviewed, specifically in terms of physical infrastructures, they were much more confident in using the internet, they were able to more correctly name things they see on the internet, and they had partly radical ideas about what they would like to learn or what they would want to change about the internet!

Looking at these results, I think it’s safe to say that social reproduction is at work and that we need to improve education for kids who do not profit from this type of social and cultural wealth at home.

But let’s dive into the details.

The boy and the aliens

(I’ll be mostly transribing the interview, which was short, and which I find difficult to sum up because… some of the questions are written in a way to encourage the kids to tell a story, and this particular kid had a thing going on with aliens.)

He’s a 13 year old boy living in the US. He has his own computer, which technically belongs to his school but can be used by him freely and he can also take it home.

He’s the first kid saying he’s reading the news on the internet; he does not actually use social media, besides sometimes watching TikTok.

When asked: Imagine that aliens land and come to you and say: “We’ve heard about this internet thing you all talk about, what is it?” What do you tell them? he replied:

Well, I mean they’re aliens, so I don’t know if I wanna tell them much.

(Parents laughing in the background.)

Let’s assume they’re friendly aliens.

Well, I would say you can look anything up and play different games. And there are alien games. But mostly the enemies are aliens which you might be a little offended by. And you can get work done, if you needed to spy on humans. There’s cameras, you can film yourself, yeah. And you can text people and call people who are far away…

And what would be in a drawing that would explain the internet?

And here’s what he explains about his drawing:

First, I would draw what I see when you open a new tab, Google.

On the right side of the drawing we see something like Twitch.

I don’t wanna offend the aliens, but you can film yourself playing a game, so here is the alien and he’s playing a game.

And then you can ask questions like: How did aliens come to the Earth? And the answer will be here (below). And there’ll be different websites that you can click on.

And you can also look up “Who won the alien contest?” And that would be Usmushgagu, and that guy won the alien contest.

Do you think the information about alien intergalactic football is already on the internet?

Yeah! That’s how fast the internet is.

On the bottom of the drawing we see an iPhone and an instant messaging software.

There’s also a device called an iPhone and with it you can text your friends. So here’s the alien asking: “How was ur day?” and the friend might answer “IDK” [I don’t know].

Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you’ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about?

Is there a way you don’t have to pay for any channels or subscriptions and you can get through any firewall?

Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first?

Well you wouldn’t have to pay for it [paywalls].

Can you describe what happens between your device and a website when you visit a website?

Well, it takes 0.025 seconds. […] It’s connecting.

Wow, that’s indeed fast! We were not able to obtain more details about what is that fast thing that’s happening exactly…

The software engineer’s kid

This kid identifies as neither boy nor girl, is 10 years old and lives in Germany. Their father works as a software engineer, or in the words of the child:

My dad knows everything.

The kid has a laptop and a mobile phone, both with parental control—they don’t think that the controlling is fair.

This kid uses the internet foremostly for listening to music and watching prank channels on Youtube but also to work with Purple Mash (a teaching platform for the computing curriculum used at their school), finding 3d printing models (that they ask their father to print with them because they did not manage to use the printer by themselves yet). Interestingly, and very differently from the non-tech-parent kids, this kid insists on using Firefox and Signal - the latter is not only used by their dad to tell them to come downstairs for dinner, but also to call their grandmother. This kid also shops online, with the help of the father who does the actual shopping for them using money that the kid earned by reading books.

If you would need to explain to an alien who has landed on Earth what the internet is, what would you tell them?

The internet is something where you search, for example, you can look for music. You can also watch videos from around the world, and you can program stuff.

Like most of the kids interviewed, this kid uses the internet mostly for media consumption, but with the difference that they also engage with technology by way of programming using Purple Mash.

In their drawing we see a Youtube prank channel on a screen, an external trackpad on the right (likely it’s not a touch screen), and headphones. Notice how there is no keyboard, or maybe it’s folded away.

If you could ask a nice and friendly dragon anything you’d like to learn about the internet, what would it be?

How do I shutdown my dad’s computer… forever?

And what is it that he would do to improve the internet for everyone?

Contrary to the kid living in the US, they think that

It takes too much time to load stuff!

I wonder if this kid experiences the internet as being slow because they use the mobile network or because their connection somehow gets throttled as a way to control media consumption, or if the German internet infrastructure is just so much worse in certain regions…

If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first?

I’d make a new Firefox app that loads the internet much faster.

The software engineer’s daughter

This girl is only 8 years old, she hates unicorns, and her dad is also a software engineer. She uses a smartphone, controlled by her parents. My impression of the interview is that at this age, kids slightly mix up the internet with the devices that they use to access the internet.

In her drawing, we see again Google - it’s clearly everywhere - and also the interfaces for calling and texting someone.

To explain what the internet is, besides the fact that one can use it for calling and listening to music, she says:

[The internet] is something that you can [use to] see someone who is far away, so that you don’t need to take time to get to them.

Now, that’s a great explanation, the internet providing the possibility for communication over a distance :)

If she could ask a friendly dragon something she always wanted to know, she’d ask how to make her phone come alive:

that it can talk to you, that it can see you, that it can smile and has eyes. It’s like a new family member, you can talk to it.

Sounds a bit like Siri, Alexa, or Furby, doesn’t it?

If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first?

She’d have the phone be able to decide over her free time, her phone time. That would make the world better, not for the kids, but certainly for the parents.

The antifascist kid

This German boy’s dad has a background in electrotechnical engineering. He’s 10 years old and he told me he’s using the internet a lot for searching things for example about his passion: the firefighters. For him, the internet is:

An invisible world. A “virtual” world. But there’s also the darknet.

He told me he always watches that German show on public TV for kids that explains stuff: Checker Tobi. (In 2014, Checker Tobi actually produced an episode about the internet, which I’d criticize for having only male characters, except for one female character: a secretary—Google, a nice and friendly woman guiding the way through the huge library that’s the internet…)

This kid was the only one interviewed who managed to actually explain something about the internet, or rather about the hypertextual structure of the web. When I asked him to draw the internet, he made a drawing of a pin board. He explained:

Many items are attached to the pin board, and on the top left corner there’s a computer, for example with Youtube and one can navigate like that between all the items, and start again from the beginning when done.

When I asked if he knew what actually happens between the device and a website he visits, he put forth the hypothesis of the existence of some kind of

Waves, internet waves - all this stuff somehow needs to be transmitted.

What he’d like to learn:

How to get into the darknet? How do you become a Whitehat? I’ve heard these words on the internet, the internet makes me clever.

And what would he change on the internet if he could?

I want that right wing extreme stuff is not accessible anymore, or at least, that it rains turds (“Kackwürste”) whenever people watch such stuff. Or that people are always told: ‘This video is scum.’

I suspect that his father has been talking with him about these things, and maybe these are also subjects he heard about when listening to punk music (he told me he does), or browsing Youtube.

Future projects

To me this has been pretty insightful. I might share some more internet drawings by adults in the future, which I think are also really interesting, as they show very different things depending on the age of the person.

I’ve been using the information gathered to work on a children’s book… which I hope to be able to share with you next year.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-52.

Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon | Scientific Reports

Tags: tech, social-media, sociology, psychology, community, fediverse, twitter

Despite understandable limitations, this studies has a few interesting findings on how communities can more easily switch platforms (in this case from Twitter to Mastodon). At least one is a bit counter-intuitive.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48200-7

Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content - The Verge

Tags: tech, moderation, social-media

Another platform failing at proper moderation…

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie

How Big is YouTube? - Ethan Zuckerman

Tags: tech, social-media, google, research

An important question for proper statistics about the content itself. Surprisingly harder to get an answer to it than one would think.

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/

The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement - The Verge

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copyright, law

It was only a question of time until we’d see such lawsuits appear. We’ll see where this one goes.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/27/24016212/new-york-times-openai-microsoft-lawsuit-copyright-infringement

The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence - ScienceDirect

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, economics, energy, ecology

Very interesting paper about the energy footprint of the latest trend in generator models. The conclusion is fairly clear: we should think twice before using them.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435123003653#fig1

More than calculators: Why large language models threaten learning, teaching, and education | by Amy J. Ko | Bits and Behavior | Dec, 2023 | Medium

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, school, learning, education

When underfunded schools systems preaching obedience and conformity meet something like large language models, this tips over the balance enough that no proper learning can really happen anymore. Time to reform our school systems?

https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/more-than-calculators-why-large-language-models-threaten-public-education-480dd5300939

You don’t need analytics on your blog

Tags: tech, blog, self-hosting, attention-economy

Definitely true… never had use for more than the server logs for understanding the traffic on my blog. No need to invade the privacy of people through their browser.

https://blog.yossarian.net/2023/12/24/You-dont-need-analytics-on-your-blog

Using Qt for Mobile in 2023 | Cameron Gaertner | Software Developer

Tags: tech, mobile, qt, android, ios

The experience is still not great on iOS and Android. This is in part due to the platforms design though, this still make Qt a great fit when you control the platform like for Plasma Mobile. For less friendly platforms this still limits the use to cases where you already have quite some Qt code. Still the same situation than a few years ago.

https://camg.me/qt-mobile-2023/

To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in JavaScript

Tags: tech, javascript, type-systems, bug, quality

Interesting study, the amount of bugs which could have been prevented by the introduction of static typing in Javascript code bases is definitely impressive (15% is not a small amount in my opinion).

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10064729/1/typestudy.pdf

Why large companies and fast-moving startups are banning merge commits

Tags: tech, git, version-control

It looks like git workflows using rebase are becoming the norm. People are actively trying to avoid merge commits in their repository history. Tooling support could be a bit better though.

https://graphite.dev/blog/why-ban-merge-commits

rscss - Styling CSS without losing your sanity

Tags: tech, css

Interesting guidelines for organizing CSS. This should avoid making things too much of a mess.

https://ricostacruz.com/rscss/

How to (and how not to) fix color banding

Tags: tech, graphics

Exploration of the causes of color banding and how to work around them.

https://blog.frost.kiwi/GLSL-noise-and-radial-gradient/

So You Want to Optimize Your Code?

Tags: tech, mozilla, observability, telemetry, profiling, optimization, performance

Very nice collection of stories from the trenches of Firefox development. Lots of lessons learned to unpack about optimizing for the right thing, tooling, telemetry and so on.

https://yoric.github.io/post/so-you-want-to-optimize-your-code/

John the Toolmaker

Tags: tech, tools, craftsmanship, developer-experience

It’s indeed important to hone your tools as well. Even though most things are not blocked due to tools, the right ones when well designed can make things easier.

https://two-wrongs.com/john-the-toolmaker

On chains and complex systems – Surfing Complexity

Tags: tech, complexity, reliability

Word of caution on how we tend to reason about complex systems. They don’t form a chain but a web, and that changes everything to understand how they can break.

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/12/23/on-chains-and-complex-systems/

Cold-blooded software

Tags: tech, dependencies, maintenance

This is an interesting metaphor. I’ll try to keep it in mind.

https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/

Beyond Technical Aspects How Do Community Smells Influence the Intensity of Code Smells?

Tags: tech, community, smells, organization, quality

This study does a good job looking at the impact of community smells over the presence of code smells. This is an excellent reminder that the organization influences greatly the produced code.

https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3A426a340b-83a6-480b-bbac-0d711092c704/datastream/OBJ/download

The LinkedIn Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework

Tags: tech, linkedin, developer-experience, metrics, productivity

Interesting framework. I wouldn’t take everything at face value, but this looks like a good source of inspiration to design your own.

https://linkedin.github.io/dph-framework/

Explorers are bad leaders | Derek Sivers

Tags: tech, management, leadership

A bit too archetypal for my taste but there’s some truth to it. If you lean towards “explorer” (I think I do), it’s hard to be also a leader. Now you could be aware of your flaws and put tools in place to compensate for them when you need lead.

https://sive.rs/exled

Bye for now! And see you in 2024!

PyPy has moved its canonical repo and issue tracker from https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/pypy to https://github.com/pypy/pypy. Obviously, this means development will now be tracked in Git rather than Mercurial.

Motivation

We still feel Mercurial is a better version control system. The named branch model and user interface are superior. But

• foss.heptapod.net is not well indexed in google/bing/duckduckgo search, so people find it harder to search for issues in the project.

• Since Heptapod has tightened its spam control, we get reports that users create issues only to have them flagged as spam.

• Open Source has become synonymous with GitHub, and we are too small to change that.

• Much of the current development comes as a reaction to fixing issues. Tracking interlocking issues is easier if all the code is on the same platform.

• The FAQ presents two arguments against the move. Github notes solves much of point (1): the difficulty of discovering provenance of commits, although not entirely. But the main problem is point (2), it turns out that not moving to GitHub is an impediment to contribution and issue reporting.

• People who wish to continue to use Mercurial can use the same method below to push to GitHub.

• GitHub is more resource rich than foss.heptapod.net. We could add CI jobs to replace some of our aging buildbot infrastructure.

Method

The migration required two parts: migrating the code and then migrating the issues and merge requests.

Code migration 1: code and notes

I used a fork of git-remote-hg to create a local Git repo with all the changesets. Then I wanted to add a Git note to each commit with the branch it came from. So I prepared a file with two columns: the Git commit hash, and the corresponding branch from Mercurial. Mercurial can describe each commit in two ways: either the commit hash or by a number index. I used hg log to convert an index i to the Mercurial hash, and then git-hg-helper from git-remote-hg to convert the Mercurial hash to a Git hash:

$(cd pypy-git; git-hg-helper git-rev $(cd ../pypy-hg; hg log -r $i -T"{node}\n"))

Then I used hg log again to print the Mercurial branch for the index i:

$(cd pypy-hg; hg log -r $i -T'{branch}\n')

Putting these two together, I could loop over all the commits by their numerical index to prepare the file. Then I iterated over each line in the file, and added the Git note. Since the git note add command works on the current HEAD, I needed to checkout each commit in turn and then add the note:

git checkout -q <hash> && git notes --ref refs/notes/branch add -m branch:<branch>

I could then use git push --all to push to GitHub.

Code migration 2: prepare the branches

PyPy has almost 500 open branches. The code migration created all the branch HEADs, but git push --all did not push them. I needed to check them out and push each one. So I created a file with all the branch names

cd pypy-hg; hg branches | cut -f1 -d" " > branches.txt

and then push each one to the GitHub repo

while read branch; do git checkout branches/$branch && git push origin branches/$branch; done < branches.txt

Note that the branches were named branches/XXX by the migration, not branch/XXX. This confuses the merge request migration, more about that later.

Issue and merge request migration

I used the solution from node-gitlab-2-github which worked almost perfectly. It is important to do the conversion on a private repo otherwise every mention of a sucessfully mapped user name notifies the user about the transfer. This can be quite annoying for a repo the size of PyPy with 600 merge requests and over 4000 issues. Issues transfered without a problem: the script properly retained the issue numbers. However the script does not convert the Mercurial hashes to Git hashes, so the bare hashes in comments show up without a link to the commit. Merge requests are more of a problem:

• The Mercurial named branch "disappears" once it is merged, so a merge request to a merged branch does not find the target branch name in Git. The conversion creates an issue instead with the label gitlab merge request.
• For some reason, the branches created by git-remote-hg are called branches/XXX and not branch/XXX as expected by GitLab. This messes up the merge request/PR conversion. For some of the branches (open PRs and main target branches) I manually created additional branches without the es. The net result is that open merge requests became open PRs, merged merge requests became issues, and closed-not-merged merge requests were not migrated.

Layered conversions

PyPy already migrated once from Bitbucket to Heptapod. Many of the issues reflect the multiple transitions: they have lines like "Created originally on Bitbucket by XXX" from the first transition, and an additional line "In Heptapod" from this transition.

Credits

We would like to express our gratitude to the Octobus team who support Heptapod. The transition from Bitbucket was quite an effort, and they have generously hosted our developement since then. We wish them all the best, and still believe that Mercurial should have "won".

Next steps

While the repo at GitHub is live, there are still a few more things we need to do:

• Documentation needs an update for the new repo and the build automation from readthedocs must be adjusted.
• The wiki should be copied from Heptapod.
• buildbot.pypy.org should also look at the new repo. I hope the code is up to the task of interacting with a Git repo.
• speed.pypy.org tracks changes, it too needs to reference the new location
• To keep tracking branches with Git notes on new commits, I activated a github action by Julian to add a Git branch note to each commit. Please see the README there for directions on using Git notes.
• Some of the merge requests were not migrated. If someone wants to, they could migrate those once they figure out the branch naming problems.

Additionally, now is the time for all of you to prove the move is worthwhile:

• Star the repo, let others know how to find it,
• Help fix some of the open issues or file new ones,
• Take advantage of the more familiar workflow to get involved in the project,
• Suggest ways to improve the migration: are there things I missed or could have done better?

How will development change?

Heptapod did not allow personal forks, so we were generous with a commit bit to the main repo. Additionally, we (well, me) have been using a commit-directly-to-main workflow. We will now be adopting a more structured workflow. Please fork the repo and submit a pull request for any changes. We can now add some pre-merge CI to check that the PR at least passes the first stage of translation. The live and active branches will be:

• main: what was "default" in Mercurial, it is the Python2.7 interpreter and the base of the RPython interpreter,
• py3.9: the Python3.9 interpreter, which also includes all RPython changes from main. This is exactly like on Mercurial, and
• py3.10: the Python3.10 interpreter, which also includes all RPython changes from main and all bugfixes from py3.9. This is exactly like on Mercurial.

Working between the repos Finding commits

If you want to figure out how a Mercurial commit relates to a Git commit, you can use git-hg-helper. You run it in the Git repo. It takes the full long hash from one repo and gives you the corresponding hash of the other repo:

$ git-hg-helper git-rev d64027c4c2b903403ceeef2c301f5132454491df 4527e62ad94b0e940a5b0f9f20d29428672f93f7 $ git-hg-helper hg-rev 4527e62ad94b0e940a5b0f9f20d29428672f93f7 d64027c4c2b903403ceeef2c301f5132454491df Finding branches

Branches migrated from Mercurial will have a branches prefix, not branch. While GitLab uses branch for its prefix, the git-remote-hg script uses branches. New work should be in a PR targeting main, py3.9 or py3.10.

Thanks for helping to make PyPy better.

Matti

Three members of the Real Python team are joining us this week: Kate Finegan, Tappan Moore, and Philipp Acsany. We wanted to share a year-end wrap-up with tutorials, step-by-step projects, code conversations, and video courses that showcase what our team created this year.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

Here&aposs a quick and easy one.

attrs supports frozen classes. Frozen classes are cool for a multitude of reasons, but they&aposre a tiny bit slower to instantiate compared to non-frozen classes, because they need to perform some additional checks and avoiding these checks in the __init__ uses a tiny bit of time. (We&aposre talking slotted classes here; which are awesome and the default in attrs nowadays.)

But there&aposs a way to avoid this overhead and make frozen classes be the exact same speed as ordinary classes. The only caveat is: you have to use type-checking.

Create a file somewhere in your code base and put this in it:

from functools import partial from typing import TYPE_CHECKING if TYPE_CHECKING: from attrs import frozen else: from attrs import define frozen = partial(define, unsafe_hash=True)

Now import frozen from this module and use it just like you&aposd use attrs.define or attrs.frozen. You&aposre done!

This technique should also work for dataclasses, with a slight adjustment left as an exercize to the reader.

The eagle-eyed reader might notice that we&aposre actually bamboozling the type-checker: your classes won&apost actually be frozen at runtime. The kicker is: they don&apost actually need to be.

As long as you&aposre running one on your codebase, the typechecker is the actual thing that&aposll prevent you from mutating your instances. The unsafe_hash=True will make the classes hashable, and it&aposs only unsafe if you mutate them after construction, which you won&apost. I guess you&aposll have to be careful when using a REPL or a different context where a typechecker might not hold sway, but I think that&aposs not too big of an issue.

If you&aposre still unconvinced, I&aposll leave you with two final thoughts: the memory in your computer is, ultimately, mutable. What makes immutable data structures in other languages immutable is just the amount of hoops you have to jump through to apply a mutation. This also demonstrates a basic technique statically-compiled languages use to be fast: move part of the work out of runtime into a separate, pre-runtime step. Which is exactly what we&aposve done here.

Happy New Year!

Special crossover episode of Python Bytes to wrap up 2023. Topics include: <br/> <br/> <ol> <ul><strong>Michael #1</strong>: <a href="https://hatch.pypa.io/latest/blog/2023/12/11/hatch-v180/">Hatch v1.8</a></ul> <ul><strong>Brian #2:</strong> <a href="https://svcs.hynek.me/en/stable/">svcs : A Flexible Service Locator for Python</a></ul> <ul><strong>Michael #3:</strong> <a href="https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-election-results-2024-term/40851">Steering Council 2024 Term Election Results</a></ul> <ul><strong>Brian #4:</strong> <a href="https://typethepipe.com/post/python-protocols-when-to-use">Python protocols. When to use them in your projects to abstract and decoupling</a></ul> <ul>Extras</ul><ul>Joke: <strong>Joke:</strong> <a href="https://mastodon.social/@tveskov/111289358585305218">The dream is dead?</a></ul></ol><br/> <strong>--- Episode sponsors ---</strong><br/> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/posit'>Posit</a><br> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/training'>Talk Python Training</a>