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Alan Jones
Jan 24, 2015, 8:55:45 PM1/24/15
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Just curious if there has been any new development or development thoughts? I noticed there were only a few minor hanges on launchpad.net since the last release.
Grant Paton-Simpson
Jan 25, 2015, 4:21:05 PM1/25/15
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Hi Alan,
Good question. Actually, I've been pouring a lot of time into SOFA but not where you might expect. The giant time-sink has been Mac packaging. The full explanation is very long but here are some highlights:
* Getting a working Mac dev environment (under virtual box on top of a Linux host) working again after a hard drive failure
* Getting a full range of required libraries working to allow image exporting (PDF/PNG) working on Mac. Necessitated a shift to Snow Leopard (10.6) from Leopard (10.5). These libraries include convert (part of ImageMagick), pdftk, and wkhtmltopdf.
* Getting those libraries to work when packaged. Numerous problems with libraries not behaving as per documentation. Lots and lots and lots of tedious experimentation.
I'm at a stage where I might need to compile my own version of imagemagick for 32-bit Mac. I am hoping to do this in a way that facilitates eventual packaging. Wish me luck! I have also decided to switch from py2app to pyinstaller as the community seems more active (and I know someone in it who is often asking and answering questions on mac development ;-)).
One take-home lesson - development is hard but cross-platform packaging can be very hard if you are using exotic libraries off the well-beaten path.
Anyway, once this is all done I have a new release ready to go. Only minor bug fixes and minor changes IIRC.
Assuming I am eventually successful, I am toying with an old idea - more feedback on the workings of some stats tests in cases where the number of records is low. Sort of like worked examples generated.
The other main area of work was making SOFA more automation-friendly. That involved a fair bit of refactoring but there are probably ongoing robustness benefits for all users even if automation is not used.
Any thoughts or ideas you have are welcome.
All the best,
Grant
Good question. Actually, I've been pouring a lot of time into SOFA but not where you might expect. The giant time-sink has been Mac packaging. The full explanation is very long but here are some highlights:
* Getting a working Mac dev environment (under virtual box on top of a Linux host) working again after a hard drive failure
* Getting a full range of required libraries working to allow image exporting (PDF/PNG) working on Mac. Necessitated a shift to Snow Leopard (10.6) from Leopard (10.5). These libraries include convert (part of ImageMagick), pdftk, and wkhtmltopdf.
* Getting those libraries to work when packaged. Numerous problems with libraries not behaving as per documentation. Lots and lots and lots of tedious experimentation.
I'm at a stage where I might need to compile my own version of imagemagick for 32-bit Mac. I am hoping to do this in a way that facilitates eventual packaging. Wish me luck! I have also decided to switch from py2app to pyinstaller as the community seems more active (and I know someone in it who is often asking and answering questions on mac development ;-)).
One take-home lesson - development is hard but cross-platform packaging can be very hard if you are using exotic libraries off the well-beaten path.
Anyway, once this is all done I have a new release ready to go. Only minor bug fixes and minor changes IIRC.
Assuming I am eventually successful, I am toying with an old idea - more feedback on the workings of some stats tests in cases where the number of records is low. Sort of like worked examples generated.
The other main area of work was making SOFA more automation-friendly. That involved a fair bit of refactoring but there are probably ongoing robustness benefits for all users even if automation is not used.
Any thoughts or ideas you have are welcome.
All the best,
Grant
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