[OH-Dev] Making dependencies less of a pain for OpenHatch contributors

[Asheesh Laroia]

This evening, I went to the Boston Python Project night, where a bunch of 
people worked on a bunch of different things in Python.

I learned some things, one of which is, "Maan, it's still a pain to set up 
an OpenHatch dev environment."

What I didn't realize was:

0) The git repo didn't even *clone* properly on Windows. (I fixed that 
during the Project Night; Windows doesn't like "?" in pathnames.)

1) It's, generally, quite especially difficult to get the OpenHatch code 
running on Windows and Mac OS. It's still fairly difficult on a Linuxy 
machine, make no mistake.

I tried to help some people on Windows use Vagrant. We got Ruby and 
VirtualBox and Rubygems installed on two Windows 7 machines, only to 
discover that the Ruby bindings can't find VirtualBox. So that was a 
no-go.

2) It doesn't have to be this way.

This is the most interesting thing I learned.

When some people were looking at working on moving the bug import code 
into a separate Python package, I realized that we can skip most of the 
hard-to-deal-with dependencies if we're careful.

* We can suggest people use sqlite during development, which would mean 
they wouldn't have to configure MySQL.

* For the dependencies which we suggest installing with "apt-get", we 
mostly only need them for the bug importer. When we move that out to a 
separate Python package, we can remove all those dependencies from the 
main site.

* For those dependencies which aren't pure-Python, we can try to move them 
to parts of the code that are optional, and when those parts are run, if 
the import fails, we can print a warning message explaining what to 
install.

If someone on the list wants to try working on some of these things, I 
think these changes could have really great positive impacts on people's 
experiences developing the OpenHatch site. I can provide pointers to 
someone who wants to do this.

Helping with this does not require much programming, probably, though it 
does probably require some patience. It would be a huge help.

-- Asheesh.