expoweb/handbook/troggle/trogstatus.html
2020-07-31 23:20:20 +01:00

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<h2 id="tophead">CUCC Expedition Handbook</h2>
<h1>Troggle & Expo Systems - status update</h1>
<p>Troggle is the software which runs the the expo cave survey data management and website.
<p>For earlier history see <a href="../website-history.html">Website history</a>.
<h4>May 2020 and django versions</h4>
<p>
Wookey has now moved 'expoweb' from mercurial to git largely "as-is" and will to use the git tools to patch up the history and to remove redundancies, rather than the original plan to tidy them up "at the time of conversion". Mark Shinwell is working with him on the loser (survex files) migration to git.
<p>In May we were on django 1.7 and python 2.7.17. Sam continued to work on upgrading django from v1.7 . We wanted to upgrade django as quickly as possible because old versions of django had unpatched security issues.
[Upgrading to later django versions is a real pig - not helped by the fact that all the tools to help do it are now out of date for these very old django releases.]
<ul>
<li>"Django 1.11 is the last version to support Python 2.7. Support for Django 1.11 ends in 2020." see: <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/faq/install/">django versions</a>. You will notice that we are really outstaying our welcome here, especially as python2.7 was <a href="https://python-release-cycle.glitch.me/">declared dead in January</a> this year.
<li>For a table displaying the various versions of django and support expiry dates
see <a href="https://www.djangoproject.com/download/">the django download</a> page.
Django 1.7 expired in December 2015.
Django: <a href="https://www.djangoproject.com/download/#supported-versions">full deprecation timeline</a>.
<li>Ubuntu 20.04 came out on 23rd April but it does not support python2 at all. So we cannot use it for software maintenance (well be can, but only using non-recommended software, which is what we are trying to get away from).
</ul>
<p>We planned to upgrade from django 1.7 to django 1.11, then port from python2 to python3 on
the same version of django, then upgrade to as recent a version of django as we could. But we have
discovered that django1.7 works just fine with <a href="https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/python3/">python3</a>, so we will move the development version to python3 during June and
then upgrade the server operating system from Debian <var>stretch</var> to <var>buster</var> before
tackling the next step: thinking deeply about when we migrate from django
<a href="trogdesignx.html">to something else</a>.
</p>
<p>
Enforced time at home is giving us a new impetus to writing and restructuring the documentation for everything.
<h4>June 2020</h4>
<p>Sam was a bit overworked in trying to get an entire university to work remotely so Philip [Sargent] got troggle on django 1.7 to work on python 3.5 and then 3.8. He then did the slog of migrating it through the django versions up to 1.11.29 - the last version before django 2.0 . 1.11.29 is an LTS (long term support) version of django. In doing this we had to retreat to python3.7 due to a django plugin incompatibility.
<p>
In the course of these migrations several unused or partly-used django plugins were dropped as they caused migration problems (notably staticfiles) and the plug-ins pillow, django-registration, six and sqlparse were brought up to recent versions. This was all done with pip in a python venv (virtual environment) on a Windows 10 machine running ubuntu 20.04 under WSL (Windows Systems for Linux) v1.
<p>Missing troggle functions were repaired and partly-implemented pages, such as the list of all cavers and their surveyed passages, were finished and made to work. The logbook parsing acquired a cacheing system to re-load pre-parsed files. The survex file parsing was completely rebuilt to reduce the excessive memory footprint. While doing so the parser was extended to cover nearly the full range of survex syntax and modified to parse, but not store, all the survey stations locations. A great many unused classes and some partly written code ideas were deleted.
<h4>July 2020</h4>
<p>Wookey upgraded debian on the server from 9 <var>stretch</var> to 10 <var>buster</var> and we got the python3 development of troggle running as the public version (with some http:// and https:// glitches) by 23rd July. <var>Buster</var> will be in-support definitely until June 2024 so we are rather pleased to be on a "not ancient" version of the operating system at last. This concided with a last tweak at improving the full cave data file import so now it runs on the server in ~200 seconds. Which is considerably more useful than the ~5 hours it was taking earlier this year.
<p>We plan to stick with debian 10 <var>buster</var>, django 1.11.29 and python 3.7.5 (the standard on <var>buster</var>) until spring 2021 when we may upgrade debian to the forthcoming stable release 11 <var>bullseye</var>. At that point debian will have python 3.8 as standard and we will migrate to django 2.x, hopefully getting as far as django 2.2 which is an LTS and actually in support until April 2022.
<p>With any luck that will be the last of our involvement with django migrations as we may not move on from using django 2.2 until we stop using django altogether, see <a href="trogspeculate.html">troggle architecture speculations</a>.
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<img border="1" class="onright" width="150px" src='tricky-troggle.jpg' alt='git logo'/></a>
Return to: <br />
<a href="../website-history.html">Website history</a><br /><br /><br />
Go on to: <a href="trogarch.html">Troggle architecture</a><br />
Return to: <a href="trogintro.html">Troggle intro</a><br /><br />
Troggle index:
<a href="trogindex.html">Index of all troggle documents</a><br /><hr />
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