One of the things we're adding to the manual is a chapter on design decisions. This is important for two reasons:

1. people new to the project can read it, learn what we've decided so far, and why
2. people new to the project can glean more about how we plan to do what we're doing
3. head off "why didn't you do xyz?" questions which the project team has discussed, decided, and moved on
4. gives us a good resource for re-evaluating decisions later on down the road when necessary
5. gives people working on other projects a good resource for working through these sorts of decisions more quickly for their project

For April 30th, we need to do the following:

1. format the question and answer sections in an appropriate way
2. add sections that should be covered that aren't yet
3. add a workflow bit at the bottom for how to add questions in the future

We need to start testing views to make sure they work right. Right now we should create a "test app" to start testing things in.

Use webtest: http://pythonpaste.org/webtest/

The testing app should be importable from something like:

from mediagoblin.tests.tools import get_test_app test_app, webtest_app = get_test_app()

where the test_app is the MediaGoblinApp instance and webtest_app is a wrapped instance in webtest.

The testapp should do the following things:

• create a new database with the database name 'mediagoblinunittests' or something with the default connection settings, dumping an old database if it exists
• Attach a mediagoblin.app.MediaGoblinApp instance to webtest with that database... see the structure of paste_app_factory to see how to do this
• create a public_store and a queue_store that write to temporary directories. Use tempfile.mkdtemp() to create these directories
• when calling setup_celery_from_config it should make sure the mongodb database that it calls is the mediagoblinunittests database we created.

One note: cache the database connection in a global variable like mediagoblin.tests.tools.DATABASE_CONNECTION and also note whether celery is set up in mediagoblin.tests.tools.CELERY_IS_SET_UP... we should only set up celery once :)

The setup bits in the hacking howto don't work on Fedora 15.

Jef gets this when he runs python bootstrap.py && bin/buildout:

Develop: '/home/jef/mediagoblin/.'
Develop distribution: Paste 1.7.5.1
uses namespace packages but the distribution does not require setuptools.
Uninstalling make_user_dev_dirs.
Updating mediagoblin.
Develop distribution: Paste 1.7.5.1
uses namespace packages but the distribution does not require setuptools.
Installing make_user_dev_dirs.

curious schendje: is that the entire output from buildout? or just a snippet that's everything okay, yes, something's wrong then schendje: I'll look into this... I guess if you like, you can not worry about it and just design into a plain html file and I can incorporate it

What should happen is that running that command downloads all the requirements and builds an environment to run GNU MediaGoblin in.

Making this an issue for 0.0.2.