Flatten a list in a python one-liner

I sometimes need to flatten a list in a list comprehension or generator expression (usually because I'm doing work inside of a template where keeping temporary variables is somewhat painful). This has stumped me for a while but today I found itertools.chain() which worked wonderfully. Here's how I found out I could make use of it:

>>> import itertools
>>> data = [(1,2), (3,4,5), (6,7)]
>>> [i for i in itertools.chain(*data)]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

New Election Software

As Fedora folk know, the Fedora Board Election is currently taking place. What people might not all be aware of is that the election software has been completely rewritten by one of our all-star contributors, Nigel Jones. Since I wrote the former election software, I'm well aware of its shortcomings: a manual process for setting up an election, no confirmation pages, limited styles of voting, only a single election at a time, and it just plain looked ugly. Nigel looked at all the problems and wrote a new app in TurboGears that fixed them. Not only does it solve all the problems we had before but it gives us a much more flexible framework for further enhancements. If we want new styles of voting or a new Fedora theme, it will be much easier to implement that with the new code.

So if you're on one of the Fedora IRC channels, give a warm thank-you to "G" for the excellent work he's done!

Why I Love Open Source

I've had a bunch of items on my TODO queue for the pkgdb that would be major enhancements to its usability but haven't been able to work on them due to higher priority things constantly coming up (FAS, figuring out why common operations are so slow, eliminating unicode crashes, mass branching, etc) This doesn't mean that I don't know there are usability issues with the pkgdb, though. And every time I see those issues I have to shudder and promise myself that I'll have time to fix them soon.

Well, for at least a few of those most requested features that's no longer necessary! Christopher Aillon (caillon) submitted a patch to add UI to the user package page to filter packages according to whether you own them or not. This is great as it means I'll be able to set the default filter to owner, approveacls, and commit and people will be able to easily change the settings themselves.

An even bigger enhancment is being worked on by Ionuț Arțăriși (maploin) who has recently started hacking on the PackageDB. He's adding search capability so that we can find packages by keyword a la yum search. Because of the infrastructure change freeze that we're enforcing until Fedora 9 is out the door, I don't have a test server running his code yet. If you want to try it out, though, it's available by checking out the bzr repository:

bzr branch
bzr://bzr.fedorahosted.org/bzr/packagedb/mapleoin-devel

Instructions for configuring a test server are in the README file.

Here's a few screenshots to whet your whistles:

Mugshot to the Rescue!

While doing other things after dinner I happened to see this entry go by in my mugshot stacker and thought, hmmm... I should look at that. One click later I was looking at the suspect changeset on fedorahosted's trac instance and confirmed that it would break bugzilla sync. A few minutes of editing and a fix was committed.

Moral of the story #1: When set up to watch the RSS feed for your project's commits mugshot can help get the right eyes on a problem quickly.

Moral of the story #2: If you have any doubts about a change make sure to mention them in the first line of your commit message.

Does it say good things about inkscape or bad things about the other programs we have available that it's what I use to model objects and relationships when I program?