Like Riding a Build Cycle... You Never Forget

After some months of above average slacking, I picked up on Zwiki hacking again a bit the last few days. I'm enjoying it, but it took some time to get started again. Where is the stuff again? How did we do this, that, the other thing? We also changed some things in the way we worked, with checkin messages now going to GeneralDiscussion (unfortunately they have to be cleaned up manually).

Speaking of such stuff, I really enjoyed this article called Software Builders by Diomidis Spinellis, quote:

"As much as I nostalgically remember the days when I could cook and eat dinner while compiling an application, a quick build cycle can keep developers focused..."

Wonderful! Back to Zwiki, we're (actually mostly Simon is - as mentioned I've been slacking a lot) moving the code base to Unicode for the data storage. Even though it's complicated, I've got a good feeling about it. We also have a Roadmap 2008 now. We've got an -unstable branch, which currently is at the point where it powers zwiki.org without much trouble. At first the Roadmap said that Plone support is to be terminated, but lately it's back, on minimal burner (no, I don't care, as long as I don't have to look at that stuff).

What I really would like next, is to test for unicode/utf8 transitions in our functional tests (built upon zope.testbrowser), but so far I haven't found out how I could do that. I'm talking about going through a cycle of page creation / edit / display page / search page with mixed Greek and German text and properly checking the displayed content at each stage. Problem is, it's all in a text file and my first tries resulted in UnicodeErrors even for stuff that worked in a browser. Of course I'm doing something wrong there.