What a way to spend an evening.

As I attempted to rewrite some Gitlab automation from bash to python, I stumbled over what should have been a trivial thing: collapsing section headers. They were not trivial.

One of my new years resolutions this year was to try and replace bash scripting with python in some of my projects. The reasons for this include the ability to use objects to group parameters together.

At today’s (Jan 19, 2025) Python over Coffee meetup, Ricardo suggested that I look at the plumbum library as a tool to help make that transition. In my first hack at using it, I came across an issue: I need to read in environment variables.

If you can’t read the text on the default index page of your Apache HTTPD server, you can make it larger with a .htaccess file.

cat .htaccess 
IndexOptions NameWidth=80

If you put this in the root of the troublesome tree, it will server for that directory and all directories below it.

Not quite as succinct as I would have liked, but this does work. This is a one liner in Bash, and I had hoped to do it with a single python call once I had the repo object established. In general, diffs are not simple to do on blob objects. I had trouble using the difflib and set approaches to diffing the two files, possibly due to the fact that I was originally not decoding the streams. Thus all the splitlines work probably can be simplified.

With the inclusion of the Generators, the main functions seem to be in the right shape. What seems off is the naming of things. For example, we have a couple functions that take a parameter named “board” but it turns out they mean different things. The names of classes do not seem to align with what they are doing.

Lets continue with the renaming of things and see where it leads us.

But first: we can remove the exceptions to the flake8 testing, and, with the removal of some white space, we can run with all the pep8 rules intact. Now, on to renaming.

I am not going to go through each commit, but will try to provide enough context so you could follow the logic in the commits in github.

This is the last article in my Long Refactoring series. You can read the first article here.