[openspending-dev] Version 0.13.0

[Tryggvi Björgvinsson]

Hi all,

For a long time we have had version 0.11 of OpenSpending (since October
2011). We then for a short time had a version 2.0 alongside our 0.11 (we
had not reached 2.0 so it was kind of confusing, but it snuck in with
the re-theme of our docs back in January -- 2.0 came in according to the
python convention while openspending (version 0.11) had its own
convention).

I corrected all that and redid how versions are handled about a month
ago. We now do versioning as recommended by Zooko (probably best known
for Tahoe-LAFS and Zooko's Triangle). This is a nice mix of the two
conflicting versions we had (the magic happens in setup.py,
openspending/__init__.py, and openspending/_version.py for those of you
interested).

While making those changes and removing the erroneous 2.0 I decided it
was time to bump up the version to version 0.12.0 without announcing
anything per se. Versions aren't as big of a deal in our continuous
deployment setup so nobody is really looking at them.

But that's not entirely correct. Versioning, when done properly, can
help both users and new contributors (and ourselves) better understand
what is happening on the project and allows us later on to introduce
backwards incompatible changes in a way that we can prepare users and
contributors for (this is something we should always avoid, but still a
safety pin worth having). Perhaps most importantly, it helps us plan for
the future with milestones. What do we want to see in version 1.0.0 or
1.5.0 etc.?

We'll be using the Semantic versioning system, introduced by Tom
Preston-Werner (a convention had been used before by numerous projects
but just on a as project-members-decided-they-would-use-numbers basis):
http://semver.org/

In this versioning system we have the <major>.<minor>.<patch> where
major versions are backwards incompatible, minor are compatible changes,
and patches are bug fixes etc (goals along the way to our next
minor/major version).

...and with that I'm going to introduce backwards incompatible changes
in a minor version by introducing version 0.13.0 (oh isn't it wonderful
how you can break rules as soon as you set them). It probably won't
update that frequently in the coming months, but as more contributors
jump on board and more pull requests start pouring in we'll get closer
to the open source development mantra: "release early, release _often_".

We've done a lot of changes over the past few months with a lot of help
from the community, especially on the code cleanup front. We are now
fully pep8 compliant and pyflakes error free.

We should all be very thankful for the tremendous work of Jorge C.
Leitão, Randal Moore,  Justin Duke, and garethpdx who have helped us
clean up our code base. There's still a lot of work to be done, but
thanks to Jorge, Randal, Justin and garethpdx we can all now feel it,
the code can be tamed! Thanks all of you!

In those changes I felt I had to make a substantial change to how celery
worked in OpenSpending. We did a lot of weird magic to hook celery into
paster as a command and we had to do this strange (unused) import:
"from openspending.command import celery"
to set some configuration variables in order for celery to work. That
has now been scrapped and we have a new version of celery in
OpenSpending (version 3.1.11).

Celery is no longer managed via paster, we can now use the celery
commandline tool that comes with celery to launch our workers. Instead
of manually setting a lot of stuff in a config file we can now just do
something like:

celery -A openspending.tasks -p <ini-file> -l info worker

(The -p option there is still needed to provide the pylons ini file, and
is an openspending extension of celery, since other configurations, such
as the database are still managed by config files).

More information about the celery tool and how it can launch workers here:
http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/userguide/workers.html

That's the big incompatible change which sparked off version 0.13.0.
This is not a user facing change so I decided against a major version,
but for those of us that have a development version that's a change
which is pretty important to know about.

So welcome to the new versioned OpenSpending. I hope you'll all enjoy :-)

With this announcement of a new versioning system and the new version I
think it is in order to ask the mailing list two questions:

* What would you like to see in version 0.14.0?
* What would you like to see in version 1.0.0?

-- 

Tryggvi Björgvinsson

Technical Lead, OpenSpending

The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org>

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