[Twisted-Python] Re: Debugging client programs

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 05:09 PM, Christopher Armstrong wrote:

> I've written a few clients with Twisted, usually GUI things, and I've
> never used twistd.

For most client-ish things, it's just not appropriate.  I wish it could 
be, but the vaguaries of GUI development prevent it :).

> Sometimes it would be possible, but I think in your
> case, it's not worth all the hassle.

The case where it's useful is when "deployment" is a separate task from 
"installation" - for offlineimap, I don't gather that this is the case.

> Maybe if someone made a _sane_ programmatic interface to twistd (so 
> you could fire it up after
> figuring out which reator you want to use, etc), it would be usable in 
> this situation, but that doesn't exist.

The general idea behind twistd is that it's a unix-centric way of 
managing Twisted services.  It's a daemon.  For an application like 
this, you don't want a daemon, because in at least some circumstances, 
you don't want to daemonize :-).

In general I think that trying to present a programmatic interface to 
twistd is a waste of time.  There should be different service-managing 
programs for different operating systems, and suggesting front-ends to 
twistd will instantly destroy that kind of portability.