Notes from Python SIG, 23-Oct-2008: unittest and Sphinx

[Ted Roche]

{Delayed a bit due to the server crash...}

An even dozen (or maybe an odd dozen...) folks attended the October
Python Special Interest Group meeting, held as usual on the fourth
Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator.

It was a busy and exciting meeting. Vigorous conversations filled the
first half hour, as we welcomed a few new members, a few members not
seen in a long time, caught up on news and what's new in the Python
world, and made a round of introductions.

Kent S. Johnson presented a new episode [4] of Kent's Korner, talking
about the unit testing facilities available in Python. Python has a
couple of options, including a xUnit-clone version and a more Python
system in nose. We got into a great discussion on the philosophy of
unit-tests, the test-first-fail-code-test cycle, test-driven
development, and so forth. It was quite enlightening.

Arc Riley made the second presentation on the Sphinx documentation
generator for Python. Arc talked about the history of Python
documentation, with docstrings and EPyDoc and ReStructuredText (not to
be confused with ReST, Representational State Transfer!). Sphinx seems
to be a popular project name these days, as I heard about a different
project by the same codename both at the RubySIG [3] and maintainer
Patrick Galbraith's presentation at MonadLUG [2]).

Arc provided us with the slides to his presentation, available on the
gnhlug site here: [1]


Links and notes from this meeting [0] and past meetings [*] can be found
at Shawn O'Shea's blog at http://eth0.net/ -- thanks, Shawn!

NOTE that the next meeting of PySIG will take place on Wednesday
December 17th at the Amoskeag Business Incubator across the hall from
our usual meeting room. Hope to see you there!

Thanks to Arc and Kent for great presentations, to Bill and Alex for
organizing and running the meetings, to Janet for the incredible
cookies, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the great facilities,
and to all who attended and participated.

[4] http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/kk/00014.html
[3] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/15795
[2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/15769
[1] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PySIG20081023Sphinx
[0] http://www.eth0.net/blog/?p=16
[*] http://www.eth0.net/blog/?p=15

-- 

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com