zia

Hopefully the final note about moving a bzero blog from Solaris onto Windows: Just remove the directory.dbm file if you are moving from a big-endian host. I think it's just a kind of cache, but anydbm barfs because it can't figure out how to open it. Phil: if my suspicion is right about that, you might want to catch that exception and tell the user to remove (or move aside) that file.

But ... bummer, bzero gets some internal database problem when I attempt to do the "bzero zia send":

Publish
opening state file c:\dl\.bzero\zia\directory.dbm
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "c:/cygwin/usr/local/lib/bzero/bzero", line 21, in ?
main.main()
File "/home/phil/bzero/b0lib/main.py", line 162, in main
File "/home/phil/bzero/b0lib/poll.py", line 147, in main
File "/home/phil/bzero/b0lib/publish.py", line 28, in __init__
File "c:\insw\Python\lib\anydbm.py", line 83, in open
raise error, "db type could not be determined"
anydbm.error: db type could not be determined
Exception exceptions.AttributeError: "Publisher instance has no attribute 'state'" in r.__del__ of > ignored


I though bzero didn't need no stinkin' database — doesn't it just use the OS' filesystem for stuff like that?

After a few (six) unsuccessful attempts at getting bzero to invoke my editor, I think I finally have bzero copied to and set up on my laptop (Windows XP). Here are a few notes:

• Background: I use Cygwin. I hate long pathnames. I hate pathnames with spaces in them. So I hate the default "home" directory that Windows NT-2k-XP saddle you with. So my cygwin setup sets $HOME to my short home location, /c/dl. (Note that I did the funky "mount" command that lets you use "/c" instead of "/cygwin/c".)
  
• Where the bzero install notes suggest "C:/Documents and Settings/your_name/.bzero", it does appear that the HOME environment variable is good enough to fix that, to allow it to use (for me) "C:/dl/.bzero" instead.
  
• But I did have to shortcut my bin directory's shell scripts in the EDITOR environment variable, and make it point directly to gvim.exe or xemacs.exe.
  
• (Reminder) Also had to change my scripts through which I invoke bzero, to run it explicitly with "python bzero ..." instead.
  
• I also hate hidden files (insert different rant about Unix conflating the ideas of "preferences directory", "home directory" and "top directory of my hierarchy"), so it would be nice if I could specify, via another environment variable, where bzero keeps my weblog's data.
  

Next: we'll see whether it actually uploads anything.