Making WooMe

At WooMe we do a lot of releases. We’ve done more than 1 a day so far this year.

We’d like to go quicker.

One of the things that slows us down is the way we manage releases. It’s fast but it’s very manual. We use trac. We make tickets for everything that is going into the release and then we display the releases on a page - when the releases are done we can move them to a page of previous-releases.

This is quite manual. Especially the tagging of the tickets as a particular release (I used to use a bit of emacs and python to achieve it).

So I settled down this evening to solve this problem. I did two things:

• I’ve updated our traccmd program so that it can create milestones and mark milestones as completed (the updates aren’t on trac-hacks yet but they will be soon)
• I’ve written a new macro plugin for trac that can display a milestone in the same way we used to display releases manually.

What really excites me is the wiki macro and it excites me because it has recursive wiki formatting. Here’s the code:

def expand_macro(self, formatter, name, args):
    wikitext = """== %(mn)s ==                                                                             
[[TicketQuery(milestone=%(mn)s,order=id,desc=0,format=table,col=summary|owner|status)]]""" % {
        "mn": args
        }
    out = StringIO()
    Formatter(self.env, formatter.context).format(wikitext, out)
    return Markup(out.getvalue())

You can pass wiki back out from a wiki processor! That’s just so brilliant. I love it.