Week 5

The past weekend was Thanksgiving, and involved a bit of travelling and family time. Most of the work I did on Freeseer was from earlier in the week, although I managed to sneak in a bit of homework between bouts of Turkey meals.

What I Worked On

Plugins

I spent the earlier part of the week working Plugin refactoring. The first task I spent time on was writing up a brief description of the unsupported plugin problem I had found while refactoring the firewire plugin last week, which can see read all about in this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16tRySYdZIaKww8L32wWFMSMX67ifXy77VjNh3zSBWd8/edit

Given feedback from one of Freeseer's mentors, I re-visited all of the plugins that were potentially affected by the above issue and simplied their Config classes to use StringOptions instead of ChoiceOptions. 

I also spent some time converting the last plugins that were still using the old Plugin Manager configurations to use Config classes instead: Pip, VideoPassthrough, Audiofeedback, Ogg Icecast, Ogg output, Videopreview, RTMP Streaming.

https://github.com/Freeseer/freeseer/pull/589

Configuration API Spec

I did some review of RESTful API design and started on a draft for the Freeseer Configuration API Spec, documented here: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1efjdlFTFlYLX0XOYs1hIjBC6rxLRXBjMjiqUdPBHqSc/edit?usp=sharing

So far this spec includes endpoints for user profile, the general config page, the recording config page,  accessing plugin categories (audio, video, file, streaming) and specific plugins. I have not yet considered endpoints for the other two pages in the configuration tool.

Issues

I had an interesting issue with the Travis-CI unit tests earlier in the week. Basically, the multimedia unit tests were failing on Travis despite not failing when I ran them locally. To complicate matters, the failure on Travis was silent: There was no unit test output of any sort, and no messages specifying which particular test was failing. The test script just exited abruptly at the test_multimedia.py file.

The actual cause for the unit test failure was related to one of the plugins having a default value that was incompatible with the VM that Travis was running the tests on: The VideoPassthrough Plugin's default input was set to 'Desktop Source', which is unfortunately not supported on Travis. Changing this to 'Video Test Source' fixed the issue.

More importantly, we never did quite figure out why the unit tests were failing silently. If this happens to someone else in the future, one way of ensuring more output is to modify the ./run_tests script in the root folder of Freeseer by making this change as suggested by mtomwing:

-run_or_fail "src" "python setup.py test"

+run_or_fail "src" "py.test --verbose"

What I Will Be Working On

The coming week I plan on continuing work on both the plugin refactoring and the configuration API spec, and hope to get feedback on both. If the API spec looks reasonably good and I have extra time, then I will also start on writing the Configuration Controller class.