:date: 2018-04-14

========================
Saturday, April 14, 2018
========================

Today I mostly worked on :ref:`eidreader` and its integration into
Lino.  A historic moment: It is now possible to read Belgian eID cards
into :ref:`avanti` or :ref:`welfare` without a Java. Including the
picture. Disclaimer: it works with *my* eID card, I didn't test it on
other cards until now.  TODO: write documentation so that interested
developers can watch it in action.

Five releases in one day
========================

The :ref:`eidreader` had 5 releases today.

Marc Rabaey reported a problem with :ref:`eidreader` 0.0.1 (it was not
possible to install it)::

    $ pip install eidreader
    Collecting eidreader
      Downloading eidreader-0.0.1.tar.gz
        Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
        Traceback (most recent call last):
          File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
          File "/tmp/pip-install-2hj2tlzx/eidreader/setup.py", line 3, in <module>
            exec(compile(open(fn, "rb").read(), fn, 'exec'))
        FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'setup_info.py'

        ----------------------------------------
    Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-install-2hj2tlzx/eidreader/

  
It took me a few version numbers to fix the issue (because it's
difficult to test these issues without actually releasing).  Now
(version 0.0.4) it should work.

.. An important step now is to test the script with all kinds of real
   eid cards.  I guess that there will be miscellaneous issues and
   more changes in the field names.

The problem was that my :xfile:`setup_info.py` trick doesn't work for
single-file projects, it works only when there is a package.
I read `this document
<https://packaging.python.org/guides/single-sourcing-package-version/>`__
but could not find any better solution.

I continued my work on getting the whole system to run. One gotcha was
that the ``data`` in ``requests.post(url, data=data)`` must not be a
nested dict (i.e. a dict containing other dicts). Actually they
explain it well: `More complicated POST requests
<http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/user/quickstart/#more-complicated-post-requests>`__.

Another challenge was that the Java version obviously had some
powerful date parser which understands strings like
``"01.JUN. 1968"``.  This is how my birth date is stored on my Belgian
ID card).  My favorite package `python-dateutil
<https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/>`__ which claims to
provide `Generic parsing of dates in almost any string format
<https://dateutil.readthedocs.io/en/stable/parser.html>`__ fails when
parsing that string:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse as date_parser
>>> date_parser("01.JUN. 1968", ignoretz=True)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: Unknown string format

The stumblestone is the missing space after the day.  If we add it
manually, it works:

>>> date_parser("01. JUN. 1968")
datetime.datetime(1968, 6, 1, 0, 0)

But that's of course just a hint for improving the parser, not a
solution for our problem.

I tried with `ignoretz` and `fuzzy`, but none helped:

>>> date_parser("01.JUN. 1968", ignoretz=True)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: Unknown string format

>>> date_parser("01.JUN. 1968", fuzzy=True)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: Unknown string format

Then I tried the `dateparser <http://dateparser.readthedocs.io>`__
package which turned out to be more successful:

>>> import dateparser
>>> dateparser.parse("01.JUN. 1968")
datetime.datetime(1968, 6, 1, 0, 0)

I ended up extending the :meth:`lino.utils.IncompleteDate.parse`
method.


And then I pushed a big bunch of changes I had been doing during the
last week. Thy break the test suites, but I was impatient to publish
them.  Here is (rather: should be) a summary of these changes.

Subtle changes in :ref:`atelier`:

- :file:`atelier/__init__.py` no longer executes
  :xfile:`setup_info.py` file
- Fixed a failure when :cmd:`inv prep` was invoked from a subdir of
  the project's root.