TurboGears-1.0.4/SQLAlchemy-0.4 upgrade

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Hello TurboGears application developers,

We would like to upgrade the version of Turbogears and SQLAlchemy 
present on the Fedora Infrastructure app servers in the near future.

There are a few details that make this an update that I would like to 
have people test heavily but overall it should be an easy upgrade for 
most people.  Details:

TurboGears 1.0.4 is an update that retains TG-1.0.x compatibility.  We 
don't anticipate any problems with this portion.

SQLAlchemy 0.4 is an incompatible update to SA-0.3.x.  TurboGears-1.0.4 
includes changes to allow us to use it with minimal porting.  Most 
Fedora Web apps are using SQLObject so they shouldn't be affected by 
this update.  python-fedora's tgfas, pkgdb, and smolt use SQLAlchemy. 
loupgaroublond has already ported smolt so porting tgfas and pkgdb 
should be all that is needed to enable this.  I'll be testing ports of 
both of those this week.

If anyone has another web app that should be accounted for by this 
update, please *holler loudly*.

The two issues I anticipate:
1) FC6 is EOL but app3 is still FC6.  I've had success using EPEL-5 
packages on FC6/app3 for a few packages in the past but this could be a 
bit more involved as TurboGears has a lot of dependencies.  Unless we 
can plan on obsoleting app3 before we upgrade we'll need to do some 
testing on publictest1 as well as publictest10 to be sure that the TG 
package and dependencies work on FC6.

2) Because python-fedora has to be ported to the new SA API I also want 
to update the code to use the latest TurboGears conventions.  This will 
allow us to simplify the TG-Auth code quite a bit (I'll be able to get 
rid of about half of our code in favor of code that's carried in TG 
proper).  However, there is the risk that some of the bugs that we fixed 
when creating our code will be reintroduced because of this.  I'm 
thinking especially about the session bug where people would hit the 
login page and then not be logged in or hit the logout page but not be 
logged out.  Since that bug was hard to reproduce reliably, I'll need 
other people to help test this.

I'm getting the new python-fedora working on publictest10 right now and 
will be installing and testing the new stack on publictest1 soon 
(probably tomorrow.)  I'll send a note for people to beat on it while I 
port over the packagedb.

-Toshio

[Mike McGrath]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

>  Hello TurboGears application developers,
>
>  We would like to upgrade the version of Turbogears and SQLAlchemy present on
>  the Fedora Infrastructure app servers in the near future.
>
>  There are a few details that make this an update that I would like to have
>  people test heavily but overall it should be an easy upgrade for most people.
>  Details:
>
>  TurboGears 1.0.4 is an update that retains TG-1.0.x compatibility.  We don't
>  anticipate any problems with this portion.
>
>  SQLAlchemy 0.4 is an incompatible update to SA-0.3.x.  TurboGears-1.0.4
>  includes changes to allow us to use it with minimal porting.  Most Fedora Web
>  apps are using SQLObject so they shouldn't be affected by this update.
>  python-fedora's tgfas, pkgdb, and smolt use SQLAlchemy. loupgaroublond has
>  already ported smolt so porting tgfas and pkgdb should be all that is needed
>  to enable this.  I'll be testing ports of both of those this week.
>
>  If anyone has another web app that should be accounted for by this update,
>  please *holler loudly*.
>
>  The two issues I anticipate:
>  1) FC6 is EOL but app3 is still FC6.  I've had success using EPEL-5 packages
>  on FC6/app3 for a few packages in the past but this could be a bit more
>  involved as TurboGears has a lot of dependencies.  Unless we can plan on
>  obsoleting app3 before we upgrade we'll need to do some testing on publictest1
>  as well as publictest10 to be sure that the TG package and dependencies work
>  on FC6. 
This is blocking on getting the transifex deps into EPEL.  At this point I
think we should stick them in infrastructure repo, some of the package
owners have been contacted and been slow to respond

I've added it to my list of things to do this week, hopefully we'll get
transifex running on other boxes soon.

Toshio, thanks for doing all of this.

	-Mike

[Yaakov Nemoy]

2008/2/11 Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger(a)gmail.com&gt;:
>  Hello TurboGears application developers,
>
>  We would like to upgrade the version of Turbogears and SQLAlchemy
>  present on the Fedora Infrastructure app servers in the near future.
>
>  There are a few details that make this an update that I would like to
>  have people test heavily but overall it should be an easy upgrade for
>  most people.  Details:
>
>  TurboGears 1.0.4 is an update that retains TG-1.0.x compatibility.  We
>  don't anticipate any problems with this portion.
>
>  SQLAlchemy 0.4 is an incompatible update to SA-0.3.x.  TurboGears-1.0.4
>  includes changes to allow us to use it with minimal porting.  Most
>  Fedora Web apps are using SQLObject so they shouldn't be affected by
>  this update.  python-fedora's tgfas, pkgdb, and smolt use SQLAlchemy.
>  loupgaroublond has already ported smolt so porting tgfas and pkgdb
>  should be all that is needed to enable this.  I'll be testing ports of
>  both of those this week. 
Smolt should still work on SQLAlchemy 0.3, maybe with some very minor
changes.  +1 for upgrading applications, as the new SA is very slick,
and TurboGears takes full advantage of this (like session creation
strategies that can be customized at a TurboGears level, so they can
be very intelligent about user sessions, or user threads, etc....).
Even so, there's no rush if we don't need to.

-Yaakov

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

>  I'm getting the new python-fedora working on publictest10 right
> now and 
>  will be installing and testing the new stack on publictest1 soon 
>  (probably tomorrow.)  I'll send a note for people to beat on it while I 
>  port over the packagedb.
>   
The new stack is running on publictest10.  The change was a bit more 
intrusive than I counted on for python-fedora so I'll be waiting until 
tomorrow to update publictest1 (when I can be available to address any 
problems that we encounter.)

I've also identified a bug in TurboGears-1.0.4.2/3 when used with 
SQLAlchemy-0.4.  This will affect people who are locating errors in 
input using exception handling like this:

session.update([..])
try:
     session.flush()
except:
     session.rollback
     [.. create an error message for the user ..]
     return [...error...]

This might be used to catch duplicates of a unique record, for instance. 
  I have a patch but I haven't gotten feedback from upstream TurboGears 
or Luke yet.  The patch is attached to this ticket:
   http://trac.turbogears.org/ticket/1721

-Toshio