triaging role

[parmentelat]

@kurtmckee @damianavila

I have seen many suggestions by @kurtmckee concerning the triage of stalled issues

Rather than closing all these issues, I'd like to suggest, if you're interested, that we give you @kurtmckee the access rights to do that yourself

[kurtmckee]

@parmentelat, I'm honored that you've suggested giving me a triage role. I've only just begun to be a user of RISE, and I don't have a feel for the project's short- and long-term goals. It may be early to give me rights to the repo.

I am interested in contributing to the project. I'm particularly interested in unit testing, linting, and explicit Python >= 3.8 support, but if you and @damianavila suggest where to focus my efforts then that will help me contribute more effectively.

[kurtmckee]

I'm unable to follow the build instructions for RISE on Windows -- the scripts in package.json are shell scripts that don't work in Powershell.

Would you be open to me making changes to this so it works on Windows as well? For example, I've read that one solution is to use an npm package called ShellJS that will run Unix commands inside of Node -- same syntax, but cross-platform. Another solution is to write custom Javascript files and call those from the scripts, like node patch-reveal-css.js.

[damianavila]

@kurtmckee, nice to see all your suggestion to close some of the issues. They were pretty accurate, I only disagree with 2 of them. Good job!

Would you be open to me making changes to this so it works on Windows as well?

I would be open to that! Although I am expecting you to support it going forward if we integrate it 😛 (obviously, to the best effort you are able to provide... I know people have other things to do, such as life 😉 )

For example, I've read that one solution is to use an npm package called ShellJS that will run Unix commands inside of Node -- same syntax, but cross-platform.

Interesting...

Another solution is to write custom Javascript files and call those from the scripts, like node patch-reveal-css.js.

@parmentelat any thoughts?

[damianavila]

@kurtmckee, how familiarized are you with JupyterLab, JupyterLab extensions, TypeScript, etc?

[kurtmckee]

I'm not familiar with any of it.

The short story is that I've run into what looks like a bug. From memory, I can reproduce it on multiple browsers by pressing Alt-R to enter the presentation, then Alt-R to leave, then Alt-R a third time, at which point the keyboard stops working for me -- I can't even use space to move forward in the presentation. All I can do is close and halt the notebook and reopen it. So I looked through the issue tracker and saw a triage opportunity.

Then I looked for a way to contribute a fix but I couldn't find any testing in the project -- no build tests, no behavioral tests, no linting. It might be there, but I didn't see it. That means I can't introduce a failing test and then fix it, and it makes me concerned that I'll introduce a regression.

Then I tried to set up the dev environment but discovered it's not compatible with Windows.

NONE of this is a complaint against the project. I'm saying that I have the need to fix a problem I have, the desire to contribute, and the ability to learn. I just need to make sure that I'm actually helping, not creating headaches for the devs.

[parmentelat]

@parmentelat any thoughts?

well a simpler path would be to install gitforwindows that is lightweight, useful on its own right, and that comes with a very decent bash - that's what I have my students install btw

hopefully this could let us use the current code as-is; but being not windows user myself, I'm far from being able to assess how much of an external burden that's going to be

if somebody offers to write new code for that, I'm all for it as long as we have an easy way to maintain the consistency between the shell-based and the powershell-based code because I am a total dummy with the latter :)

[parmentelat]

following up on this windows thing, please see issue #582