App Packaging "Event"

[thetomester13]

Hello all! I'd like to take the torch here and host the next Packaging Event. I'm thinking Wednesday at 5pm EST.

Since @doodlemania2 has mostly completed his work with Paperless-ng, and since many people are always asking about how to write tests for packaged apps, I figured I'd lead the charge with writing tests for a recently packaged app of mine, Astral.

Ideally this can be a more synchronous event, as opposed to a broadcast format. I'm happy to drive but wouldn't mind input (and conversation : ) while going through this. I'm not sure the best way to go about this, @doodlemania2 has suggested either a video call through the Matrix room from the previous event, or a Meet instance.

Happy to hear any thoughts! It'd also be good to know how many people here can plan on making it, or if another time would work better for people.

[nebulon]

I think ideally someone would lead the session and do the main presentation/coding while viewers would be able to chime in like we had with matrix. That way the session can be nicely recorded and thus offers more value in the long term.

As far as I can tell bigbluebutton would be best for this @luckow might be able to offer some advice for this.

[doodlemania2]

@nebulon I agree - the PeerTube worked well but is ideally suited for "broadcast" and not so much interactive. Matrix would be good cause it'd all be in line, but doesn't offer recording.

Has someone packaged BBB that we can leverage natively that does video, chat, recording?

[jdaviescoates]

@doodlemania2 said in App Packaging "Event":

Has someone packaged BBB

I don't think so. In part because there still isn't a stable release that'll run on Ubuntu 18.04

I've got an account on https://meet.coop though and could happily set-up a room for this. Recordings from BBB are a bit of a pain though, although they might work for this - by default the video is just of the presentation and audio and no webcams.

[jimcavoli]

I could host via Webex - easy streaming/recording and simple to operate with a decent feature set. I won't likely be able to be the one doing any of the live work initially, but I could at least facilitate the meeting for everyone.

[marcusquinn]

Of all the ones I've tried, I know it's not Cloudron, but the absolute easiest is meet.jit.si and recording to Dropbox, then you can move the video to Peertube or whatever very quickly after.

Edit: Just did a quick test, recordings are 720P, so only works well for screensharing if you have the resolution low.

Screenflow or Wondershare Demo Creator are the best screen recording options I know to record at higher resolutions.

[doodlemania2]

@marcusquinn Don't we have Jitsi packaged? Could that work?

[marcusquinn]

@doodlemania2 Perhaps. I've never ventured outside of using whatever is in the App Store, although I'm still pushing to get more dev assistance on app packaging from my network because it seems to be a bottleneck.

I think packaged or hosted is fine, I feel security is their USP, and it's ultimately going to be a public meeting anyway. I suspect recording would be best done locally, ideal resolution being 1920x1080, on Mac I tend to use "BetterSnapTool" for setting various screensize areas for recording just part of a screen without adjusting my main screen resolution.

Of all those I've tried, Jitsi has always been fast and reliable, so maybe just use their infrastructure until the Cloudron version is battle-tested?

[doodlemania2]

@marcusquinn I think as long as we get the recording uploaded to Cloudron's video system, anything will work!

[thetomester13]

Alright, I am setup using @jdaviescoates 's BBB instance for now. We're still on for tomorrow, Wednesday the 27th at 5pm EST for writing some tests! Hope to see some people there!

[thetomester13]

The BBB room that this will be taking place at is here: https://ca.meet.coop/b/jos-2xl-ze7-g0q. Hope to see you all soon!

[doodlemania2]

@thetomester13 this was such a great session today! kudos on the efforts and excited to see phase 2 - xpath for the...uh... ewe! hehe

[thetomester13]

@doodlemania2 thanks Now to start debugging some selenium/webdriver!

[girish]

@thetomester13 It was awesome! Let me know if you need help fixing the issue we had with the test aborting. A quick idea is to simply check if the tests of some other package run out of the box.

[thetomester13]

@girish good idea! I'll give that a whirl. My guess (and hope ) is it's not something super obscure, just need to check versions and such.

[jdaviescoates]

Glad to hear this went well. Would be interested to hear any feedback about how well BBB worked?

[nebulon]

@thetomester13 as a hint, you started from a test which was still using selenium in a more complex fashion. We didn't know initially how to initialize it correctly and I think copied some code from somewhere.

Here https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/freescout-app/-/blob/master/test/test.js#L38 for example you can see how you could also initialize it, without that jar and whatnot. Maybe moving to that style resolves your chromedriver issue already.

Also make sure that chromedriver and selenium node modules are latest, they are quite picky

[thetomester13]

@jdaviescoates thanks again for setting up the BBB room for us! It worked well on my end, the main thing to note is that once people were there, I didn't see the 'record' button so wasn't able to record the session through BBB (though recorded locally). Weird as we were able to do a test recording just fine ahead of time.

@nebulon ok this is great! I was able to get the versions matching and chromedriver to run properly, but this example is much cleaner and can help me make more progress, thanks!

[plusone-nick]

@doodlemania2 would you be willing to post your packaging events on twitter? Or maybe an email list? I really want to attend

[Lonkle]

I wanna make it to the next one of these, just struggling financially due to the pandemic so I'm setting little time away for my hobbies like Cloudron for now. But later in the year I'll be contributing more to these kinds of activities. ️

And I second @plusone-nick, we def need at least a way for people that don't have the app-dev label on here to be notified of these events.