EthCC 2018 Paris Workshop Results

[carver]

My apologies to the workshop group. You unintentionally became documentation testers. The good news is that your struggles were not in vain! I marked down what I could about where people got stuck, and we'll see what we can do about improving the situation.

What was wrong?

1. Old version of pip, setuptools
2. Run virtualenv setup in python console
3. Virtualenv not installed
4. Using python 2, ended up with web3 v3, because there is no v4 version available
5. Using web3 v3 (missed "--pre" during install)
6. Connection/Provider is very confusing for people: why do they have to connect to anything? how do they specify what to connect to? what are all these different providers for and why are we making them pick one?
7. Tried to use web3.auto for infura
8. Can't deploy via infura
9. Faucet down
10. Ethtoken example only works on mainnet
11. Ethtoken docs did not show how to customize w3
12. People not clear when w3 is calling the node and when working locally
13. Didn't know how to fix address checksum error
14. Pip wasn't installed
15. Could not understand solc missing error (installed separate from pysolc)

How can it be fixed?

1. Add pip & setuptools update to quickstart instructions
2. Clearer distinction between shell and python interpreter
3. Add (link to) instructions for installing virtualenv
4. Use the new pip setup.py attribute python_requires to give a cleaner error message
5. Wait for v4 release
6. Deep dive on basic questions, like "Why do I need to connect to a node?"
7. Maybe link to new "choosing a node" docs in exception when web3.auto.w3 can't find the node?
8. Wait for Constructor Functions #666
9. In docs, link to a list of several faucets for different testnets. (There's probably already a good ESE post with this
10. Write a working ethtoken example for testnet
11. Add ethtoken docs for customizing w3 in ethtoken for testnet
12. In v5, consider a separate Web3.utils attribute that is clearly never hitting the network (can host things like: type conversions, sha3, eth-account) Planned v5 changes #722 (similar to web3.js v1 approach)
13. Improve warning on failed address checksum #716 -> Improved error message on address validation #803
14. Add (link to) pip install instructions for a variety of platforms
15. Clarify solc unavailable message py-solc#40

[wolovim]

Stale issue cleanup; most of this has been addressed by now. Idea to include link to docs in auto provider is a good idea, maybe worth a new issue.