I worked recently on merging my collective.anonymousbrowser back to zc.testbrowser.

It's definitivly seems to run fine with python >= 2.5.

Points of the merge were large:

• Integrate the proxy balancing capability
• Integrate the user agent faking capability
  
• Add tests where it was missing
• Improve the "real" class
  
• Make the real class mozrunner powered, that's free you to configure a firefox, and just let the code configure a default profile for you.
• Integrate the existing "screenshot" javascript function as a class method. Thats enables you to do browser.screenshot() and that makes a screenshot of the running firefox.
  

But, something i hadn't tested, ..., was the python 2.4 support. Both zc.testbrowser and mozrunner have problems with it...

I will try to make the next commits fix that if possible.

As it's not yet officially released., you can try the code there:

   svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zc.testbrowser/branches/fastreal_screenshots_mozrunner_proxys

I did not find the time earlier to post about it.

Minitage 1.0 is out for a week now.

What you can find there ?

1. Documentation has been drasticly improved
   See by yourself:
   
   • minitage
   • minitage.recipe
   • buildout.minitagificator
   • dj.paste
   • minitage.paste
     
   • minitage.core
2. Trac got Git support
3. There are cgit and gitweb instances configured against all minitage repositories
   
4. A lot of bugfixes, as always
5. Recipes have been rewritten a bit to stick to zc.recipe.* implementations
6. minitage.recipe egg based recipes got a fresh touch:
• They do not totally rely any more on easy_install dependency system, just on their declared dependencies (extras are also supported). Thas was something i disliked with zc.recipe.egg, potentially, the easy_install call can install something, which we would'nt. And also, in some cases, the extras requirement could be wiped out. All are bugs reported upstream on the zc.buildout launchpad bugtracker.
• Their installer should now try not to look in the site-packages first, but rather the eggs cache to avoid conflict errors.
  
• I also implemented an adaptation of the zc.buildout redo_pyc function which seems to be somehow slow.
  
7. Welcome to the buildout.minitagificator egg which help minitage to conquer the world with replacing some well known recipes with their equivalent minitage implementations with some violent monkey patches. It's a buildout extension.
   
8. The "static fetcher" has been improved and bug fixed
9. There some new cool API functions like a search function which take regexes to look for minibuilds in the available minilays
   
10. minitage.paste got a great step forward with all pastes
11. All templates now have now minitage layout as an optionnal dependency. That means that you do not need minitage to generate templates, however, the normal use is to use them in minitage.
    • Plone32 template:
      • Predefined set of products to install
      • A developper mode where you have aditionnal tools installed (ptprofiler, collective.autorestart on linux, and so on) and debug mode turned on by default
      • wsgi configuration and launchers
      • A working filesystemstorage integration
      • You can use either RelStorage, ZEO or classical ZODB access
        
      • You can give to paster whatever you want to custom the buildout generation by some predefined keys.
    • Zope3 template:
      • wsgi configuration and launchers (paster and Zdaemon based)
        
      • You can use either RelStorage, ZEO or classical ZODB access
      • You can give to paster whatever you want to custom the buildout generation by some predefined keys.
    • Django template:
      • wsgi configuration and launchers
      • GeoDjango support
      • dj.paste (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dj.paste) integration. This paster factory enables you to have multiple django instances in the same pipeline
        
      • A basic application created when you generate your project to quickstart.
      • You can give to paster whatever you want to custom the buildout generation by some predefined keys.
    • Nearly all templates which have WSGI support got Spawning integration. Spawning is an über performant python based WSGI server.
      
    • postgresql, varnish, varnish2, and env profils:
      • Can run now without minitage or any project installed
    • The new paste-initd profil:
      • it generates an initscript wrapper to trigger a "paster serve" from some paste configuration of your choice

What are the minitage projects and profiles, after all ?

All are paster (see PasteScripts on pypi) templates.

Projects target to quickstart an application or a project like a plone3 or a django website.

Profiles, on the other side, are a piece of integration, targeted to be in general integrated into a minitage based project. That can be a postgresql database instance, or a shell environement file with has all minitage dependencies, that you can source when playing with your project.

For those who get annonying troubles installing reportlab 2.3 with the
distribution available on pypi, i made another distribution [1].
To achieve this, i have just done a checkout from their svn TAG (2.3) and
re-executed the sdist dance.

The troubles i had personnaly was something like that :

	"/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -l_renderPM_libart"

Here is a sample buildout using either minitage.recipe:egg or zc.recipe.egg to
install it:

[buildout]
versions=versions
parts=
    eggs
    zceggs
[versions]
reportlab=2.3

[eggs]
recipe=minitage.recipe:egg
eggs=
    reportlab
find-links=
    http://distfiles.minitage.org/public/externals/minitage/

[zceggs]
recipe=zc.recipe.egg
eggs=
    reportlab
find-links=
    http://distfiles.minitage.org/public/externals/minitage/

[1] http://distfiles.minitage.org/public/externals/minitage/reportlab-2.3.tar.gz

As a part of a recent discussion i had on irc with Stephan Richter, one of my next works will be to merge zc.testbrowser with collective.anonymousbrowser.

I worked on collective.anonymousbrowser to allow the use of proxys and proxy balancing over zc.testbrowser proxys.

Another interressant feature fir the project was also to retry urls if there were errors.

I made also some bugfix and improvments on the zc.testbrowser.real.Browser side like using mozrunner to control firefox, loading directly the js file if we are local..

What i want to do now is to port all the interresting things back to zc.testbrowser.

Hope i will have time for that this week.