I’ve done a bunch more work on Pushl to try to get it more stable. In particular, I’ve made it so that it will only recurse into feeds that are on domains that were declared in the initial requests, and I seem to have cleared up some cases which were causing it to hang and also added a global timeout which will, hopefully, prevent it from hanging indefinitely.
I do wish I could figure out what is causing the hangs when they do happen though. Oh well. Some discussion of the issue below the cut.
I’ve been working on getting Pushl much more stable and reliable, particularly around a persistent “too many open files” error I was having, which turned out to be primarily due to a fd leak in the caching routines. Oops.
Anyway, there’s also seemingly a problem with how aiohttp manages its connection pool, at least on macOS, so I’ve disabled connection keep-alive by default. However, if you still want to use keep-alive, there’s now a --keepalive option to allow you to do that. I’m finding that it doesn’t really improve performance all that much anyway.
This is feeling beta-ready but I’ll give it a few days for other issues to shake out first.
So, I just released v0.2.0 of Pushl. It was a pretty big change, in that I pretty much rewrote all the networking stuff, and fixed some pretty ridiculous bugs with the caching implementation as well.
The main thing is now it’s using async I/O instead of thread-per-connection, so it’s way more efficient and also times out correctly.
And oh gosh, I had so many tiny but critical errors in the way caching was implemented – no wonder it kept on acting as if there was no cached state. Yeesh.
Anyway, I’ll let this run on my site for a few days and if I like what I see I’ll upgrade it to beta status on PyPI.
Relatedly to category.root, I’d neglected to add category.breadcrumb to the manual when that functionality went in, and I’ve also added some usage examples, including something useful for fancy navigation bars.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to work on Publ, but the great thing is that I actually had a reason to work on it for my day job. Which is to say I’m finally being paid to work on Publ. ;)
Fixed a subtle caching bug that affects sites accessible from multiple URLs
Fixed the way that size-clamping (max_width et al) work on remote and static images
Enable JPEG optimization in the image renderer
Add the ability to link to local rendered images in a Markdown link
Also, if you’re using Publ and hosting your repository on GitHub you may have gotten a security warning regarding the version of pyyaml that Publ depends on. Don’t worry, Publ doesn’t actually use the vulnerable code (it’s actually pulled in by one of the utility scripts from the watchdog library, and not used by watchdog itself). Watchdog has an open issue about this and they’re on track to fix it Real Soon Now.
In the future Publ may actually pull in pyyaml itself for the friends-only functionality, but when it does you can be sure it’ll be a current version. :)
Just some bug fixes with view caching and image handling; in particular, remote and static images will now respect max_width and max_height for the sizing, and I fixed the way that inline images work (insofar as now inline images can work).
This entry marks the release of Publ v0.3.9. It has the following changes:
Added more_text and related functionality to image sets (an example being visible over here)
Improved and simplified the caching behavior (fixing some fiddly cases around how ETags and last-modified worked, or rather didn’t)
I also made, and then soon reverted, a change around how entry IDs and publish dates were automatically assigned to non-published entries. I thought it was going to simplify some workflow things but it only complicated the code and added more corner cases to deal with, all for something that doesn’t actually address the use case I was worried about. So never mind on that.
(What happened to v0.3.8? I goofed and forgot to merge the completed more_text et al changes into my build system first. Oops.)
I just released v0.3.6 of Publ, which just allows it to work with databases other than SQLite. In particular this is part of testing more advanced heroku deployment options.
Right now I’m primarily focusing on improving the documentation, especially the quickstart guide, since people are finally showing interest in Publ but aren’t quite sure where to begin!
I’ve also updated the sample site templates with all of the changes that have happened since, uh, June, and also included some sample content so it’s easier to get started with it.
I’ve started working on Pushl in earnest now, and one thing that was really bugging me about this is that anything which polls feeds and entries would really benefit from having client-side cache control working. Which was a big missing feature in Publ.
The short version: for any given view it figures out (pessimistically) what’s the most recent file that would have affected the view (well, within reason; it only looks at the current template rather than any included templates, which is pretty difficult to do correctly) and uses that to generate an ETag (via metadata fingerprint) and a Last-Modified time (based either on the file modification time or the time the entry was actually published).
There’s probably a few corner cases this misses but in general this makes client-side caching of feeds and such work nicely.
I found a few more annoying bugs that were shaken out from the whole PonyORM transition, as well as a couple of bugs in the new shape functionality. There’s probably a few more of these bugs lurking in the codebase (I mean, in addition to the existing bugs I know about), but here’s what’s changed:
Image shape bugs:
Fix some FileNotFound handling on images (so shape errors propagate correctly)
Make img_class and class work correctly per the documentation
Did you know that CSS3 has a style called shape-outline? It’s pretty neat, it makes it so that a floated object gets a shape based on the alpha channel of its specified image. But it’s kind of a pain to set up; in plain HTML it looks something like this:
and if you want a different shape mask for your image than its own alpha channel, you have to do a bunch of stuff like making sure that the image sizes are the same and whatever.
