Coding Period 2: Week 9
The second last week of the 10 week program is here! Started with an awesome weekly mentor mentee meeting, and a demo for the new MARS model —
Last week, we definitely did merge English and translation release into 1 directory, but they still had 2 different scripts and English for treated separate from translation. More on this later…
This week we planned a lot of minor things to be accomplished like updating the documentation with the new MARS model — adding GIFs for English and Chinese release process for better visualization and understanding.
Then we created a new guide for adding new language and the mentors decided that the Release Notes and Board Members page should be added at the end, rather than the front of the PDF. These mini and easy tasks were performed initially.
Later in the week the mentors performed user testing of MARS on their system —
anddddd…. it failed! There were some unexpected errors in Mac —
There is no Docker group so the user can’t be added to it
A new user in the container can’t be created with the same GID as current user
Some commands not found — those were specific to Linux distro
These were some failure points to name a few. However the mentors figured out ways to bypass these limitations and were still able to run the container and produce the PDF by modifying the code. This served as a critical feedback for us. They also suggested a lot desirable changes —
Merge “english_release.py” and “translations_release.py” into 1 single file
add new “repo-location” parameter in yml config file, to point to the location of “focus-areas” in the repo
Make a “words.yml” in “passive_user_input” which contains a dictionary for language translations for words — focus-areas, goal, metric, question, TOC, etc.
Remove “table_templates.py” and make 3 new “.tex” templates in “passive_user_input”
Giving some meaningful names to the sanity checks in scripts
Improve documentation in code and giving files some more descriptive names
These were some major changes suggested along with fixing the Docker issues in Mac. So our weekend stood pretty busy to implement these ideas —
We were able to implement most of these suggestion. I was able to fix the Docker issue in Mac —
Docker in Mac runs in a Virtual Machine unlike Linux — so it doesn’t require sudo permission, so I implemented a function to detect the platform and proceed accordingly. I was able to fix this issue and tested it on my friend’s Mac. Later, the mentors were also able to produce the PDF without any issues!
I also designed a little ASCII art banner for MARS —
Meanwhile Yash was working hard to combine the English and translations scripts into one. Here, virtually we are now treating English as any other translated language like Spanish and Chinese, the only difference is in the GitHub repos and paths. Yash was also successfully able to add those extra parameters in the yml file and improve the code documentation.
It has been a busy and productive week for MARS with some significant changes. Next week we will implement the other suggestions that are left make general improvement and changes documentation accordingly.
