Description:

SoL 5.1

Version:
5
Author:
Lele Gaifax <lele@metapensiero.it>
license:
GPLv3

Status:


This project contains some tools that make it easier the organization of a championship of
Carrom tournaments using either a variant of the Swiss system, the Knockout system or
even everyone against everyone events.
The main component is a Pyramid application serving two distinct user interfaces:

A very light, read only view of the whole database, where you can actually browse
thru the clubs, championships, tourneys, players and ratings. You can see it in action on
the public SoL instance at https://sol5.metapensiero.it/lit/.
A complete ExtJS based desktop-like application, that exposes all the functionalities
described below in an easy to manage interface.


Attention!
SoL requires Python 3, it does not work with Python 2


Contents

Goals

High level description


Installation and Setup

The good old way


Development

I18N / L10N
Feedback and support





Goals
These are the key points:

Multilingual application
Scarry spoke only Italian, because the i18n mechanism in Delphi (and in general under
Windows) sucks. Most of the code was written and commented in Italian too, and that made it
very difficult to get foreign contributions.

Multiuser
There is a super user (named “admin” by default) that can do everything, in particular
create other normal users, who can then log in and manage her own tournaments, but can’t
change information owned by other users.
SoL 4 also implements an optional self registration procedure.

Real database
Scarry used Paradox tables, but we are in the third millennium, now: SoL uses a real, even
if simple and light, SQL database under its skin.

Easy to use
The application is usually driven by computer-illiterated guys, so little to no surprises.

Easy to deploy
Gods know how many hours went in building f*cking installers with BDE goodies!

Bring back the fun
Programming in Python is just that, since the beginning!



High level description
The application implements the following features:

basic tables editing, like adding a new player, opening a new championship, manually tweaking
the scores, and so on;
handle a single tourney

compose a list of competitors: usually this is just a single player, but there are two
people in doubles, or more (teams)
set up the first round, made up of matches, each pairing two distinct competitors: if
the tournament is associated with a rating this considers the Glicko2 rate of each
player, otherwise uses a random pairing; either way, the tournament secretary is able to
manually change the combinations
print the game sheets, where the player will write the scores
possibly show a countdown, to alert the end of the game
insert the score of each match
compute the new ranking
print the current ranking
possibly offer a way to withdraw some competitors, or to add a new competitor
compute the next round
repeat steps c. thru i. usually up to seven rounds
possibly offer a way to go back, delete last round, correct a score and repeat
if required, play up to three final rounds between the first two competitors
recompute the ranking, assigning prizes
update the rating the tournament is associated to


handle a championship of tourneys

each tourney is associated to one championship
print the championship ranking


data exchange, to import/export whole tourneys in a portable way




Installation and Setup
The very first requirement to install an instance of SoL on your own machine is getting Python
3.10 or better[1]. This step obviously depends on the operating system you are using: on most
GNU/Linux distributions it is already available[2], for example on Debian and derivatives
like Ubuntu the following command will do the task:
$ apt-get install python3
If instead you are using M$-Windows, you should select the right installer from the downloads
page on https://www.python.org/.
Another recommended, although optional, add-on is the DejaVu fonts set, to support a rather
wide range of glyphs when producing the PDFs printouts. As usual, on GNU/Linux it’s a
matter of executing the following command
$ apt-get install fonts-dejavu
or equivalent for your distribution, while on M$-Windows you need to download them and
extract the archive in the right location which usually is C:\Windows\Fonts.

The good old way

Install SoL using pip:
pip install SoL
that will download the latest version of SoL from PyPI and all its dependencies as well

Install ExtJS 4.2.1:
python3 -m metapensiero.extjs.desktop

Create a standard config file:
soladmin create-config config.ini
and edit it as appropriate; you can also directly specify the name and the password of the
super user (by default the name is admin and the password will be asked
interactively):
soladmin create-config --admin differentone --password str4nge

Setup the database:
soladmin initialize-db config.ini

Load official data:
soladmin restore config.ini

Run the application server:
pserve config.ini

Enjoy!
firefox http://localhost:6996/
or, for poor Window$ users or just because using Python makes you
happier:
python -m webbrowser http://localhost:6996/





Development
Since version 4 the development has been moved to GitLab.
The complete sources can be downloaded with the following command:
git clone https://gitlab.com/metapensiero/SoL.git
I recommend using a virtual environment to keep you isolated from the system packages:
python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
After that, you can setup a development environment by executing the command:
pip install -r requirements/development.txt
You must then install the required ExtJS 4 sources executing:
python -m metapensiero.extjs.desktop --src
If you are a developer, you are encouraged to create your own fork of the software and
possibly open a pull request: I will happily merge your changes!
You can run the tests suite with either
make test
or with a more specific
pytest tests/models
Nowadays I tend to prefer NixOS and it’s package manager, and unsurprisingly SoL is quite well integrated in that world. An alternative way to do the above is
nix develop
make test

I18N / L10N
Currently SoL is translated in English[3], French and Italian. If you know other languages
and want to contribute, do not hesitate to contact me and I’ll be more than happy to get you
going.


Feedback and support
If you run in troubles, or want to suggest something, or simply a desire of saying “Thank
you” raises up, feel free to contact me via email as lele at metapensiero dot it.
Consider also joining the dedicated mailing list where you can get in contact with other
users of the application. There is also an issues tracker where you can open a new tickets
about bugs or enhancements.



[1]
As of this writing I’m using version 3.11 and I’d recommend using that, but SoL used to
work great with any version higher than 3.4.


[2]
In fact it may even be already installed!


[3]
The are actually two distinct catalogs, to take into account US and UK variants.


[4]
GNU Emacs comes to mind of course, but there are zillions of them: start looking at the
gettext page on Wikipedia.

License

For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.

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