Pyxform release process

To give a little background, XLSForm is the standard that allows us to build forms in Excel and pyxform is the library that converts XLSForms to XForms used by tools like Collect, Enketo, etc. The pyxform library is used in the online form conversion tool and backends that directly use XLSForms (e.g. Ona).

pyxform was last released about a year ago and so there are several new features in the ODK ecosystem not available when writing forms in Excel. Let's work towards a pyxform release on PyPi soon so we can easily update dependent tools!

I see from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyxform/ that @Ukang_a_Dickson is the PyPi package index maintainer. I believe that means he is the only one who can do an official release. @Ukang_a_Dickson would you be available and willing to do that soon? Alternately, is there someone else you could add to the maintainer list?

Before that goes out, it would be great to get some of the open pull requests reviewed and merged. I can't seem to find who the committers on that repo are. I know @Alex_Dorey, @Ukang_a_Dickson and @yanokwa are. Anyone else?

Thanks and happy late Halloween / All Saints Day. :blush:

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Exploring and understanding pyxform

I am willing to do a release soon, almost did last time but you had mentioned if we could wait for some issue to be completed first. Can we identify which issues that are open that need to be part of this release? I can have more contributions from the Ona team to close some of them.

I am also open to add another Maintainer to the PyPI, who should this be - @Alex_Dorey?

Thanks for starting the conversation.

Awesome, @Ukang_a_Dickson! If @Alex_Dorey is around and willing to be a maintainer, he'd be a great pick. I'll also put a plug in for @yanokwa. He won't be in the code so much but he's got a lot of experience managing and documenting releases.

@alxndrsn has some open pull requests cleaning up white space and allowing for not pretty printing that would be useful. I also really like what @moshthepitt has done.

In terms of open issues, here are some I would like to see addressed:

@martijnr @Alex_Dorey @yanokwa any others you think should be prioritized?

From my perspective, just releasing what is now in master would be fantastic and if the conversations around the issues above are going to be complicated, I suggest the release take priority. Having a tagged and versioned release with clear changelog (v0.10.0? v1.0.0?) will really help ensure a more consistent experience across tools that use the library.

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I will work towards a release early next week for the current master. I will let the conversation finalize on the issues you have pointed out, a bit uneasy on the PR that @moshthepitt did - going to have another look at it and have it cleaned up before I can consider it ready for merging.

As for maintainers, the names you have proposed are fine with me, I will need their PyPi username to make the change.

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:tada: :tada:

@yanokwa is yanokwa on PyPi.

@moshthepitt has two PRs open, you're probably talking about the one that makes data the name of the document root? https://github.com/XLSForm/pyxform/pull/152 Agreed that one is more dangerous and could certainly be bumped to a later release. I'll use that branch for form conversion starting now to exercise it in a realistic way.

@yanokwa is now a maintainer.

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I'm loving that pyxform is picking up steam and I agree that we should release what is on master and then try to close out the open PRs after.

@Ukang_a_Dickson if as you are doing the release early next week you run into any problems, please find @LN or me on Slack so we can help!

Thanks to everyone who has been involved in pyxform improvements and especially to @Ukang_a_Dickson for getting the release out. v0.10.0 is now on PiPy! https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyxform/0.10.0

Dependent tools will be updated soon. For anyone who wants to convert forms from the command line, see instructions at https://github.com/XLSForm/pyxform#running-the-latest-release-of-pyxform

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Thanks to @Ukang_a_Dickson's excellent work, we've been able to ship updates to the dependent tools!

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