[Twisted-Python] threadedselctreactor and releases

[Moof]

Warning: mild rant venting frustration from a user, here. I'm not trying to
offend, but I may have failed in this respect. Forgive me if I've failed in
this aim.

I've seen it mentioned quite often on the IRC channel recently, and it's
starting to get a bit silly now, I'm talking, in this case, about people
saying "you want to use wx? use threadedselectreactor".

I'd like to remind people that threadedselectreactor isn't officially
released, and people who want to release software that depends *on* twisted
prefer to work with full twisted releases, things that non-expert users can
*download* without having to go through the rigmarole of installing
subversion, and, in the case of windows users, learn to use the command line
or some obscure right-click menu. Telling people "use svn HEAD" is, quite
often, an answer that is useless for them.

So, I have three suggestions to offer. I'm writing from the point of view of
a user who doesn't know twisted inside out but does depend on it, and has
never used wxpython:

1) Support the released versions. That's sort of the point of making a
release, no? Rather than tell people "use threadedselectreactor and break
any hope of a release policy you might have" try and work out how, in this
case, people can get wxreactor working properly. This is, I gather, a
herculean effort in most cases, so I understand people's reticence towards
this course of action.

2) Make a new release of twisted.core. I gather this is unlikely to happen
in the near future, especially given the amoutn of work happening in trial
at the moment, so probably not the world's best idea. Plus, I'll get radix
moaning at me for even suggesting it ;)

3) Given the amount of people who still seem to wish to use wx with twisted,
and the frequency this thing comes up on dicussions on IRC, it's probably
worth going for this one: Backport threadedselectreactor to twisted.core 2.0
(probably not too onerous) and either make a maintenance release of
twisted.core with it in, or offer it for download as a separate package on
the main twisted page.

4) Do nothing, and leave people like me quite frustrated.

In the middle two cases, threadedselectreactor will need documenting on the
twisted site. There's plenty of incidental documentation out there, it just
needs someone to gather it up and put it together in the howto directly.

This isn't just about threadedselectreactor, it just seems to be the most
obvious problem. I first came across the "use svn HEAD" answer when I came
across a bug that had been fixed in trial. It's great, it works lovely now,
but the software environment I'm now developing in is not going to be the
one my users would eventually be downloading form the twisted webpage.
Thankfully, my users live in a controlled corporate environment, and, more
to the point, won't be runnning the test suite, so I have the possibiliy of
testing out my software with twisted release before sending it out for
release, but I'd hate to have to release a wx-dependent piece of software
here, something that is looking increasingly likely in the next three months
or so.

Yes, I am aware that most of you are volunteers. It's a volunteer-run and
volunteer-supported project. You guys are doign great work developing the
project, and I'm not tryign to denigrate that effort, merely make you aware
of a particular frustration from the point of view of a user of your
fabulous product, and one which probably contributes to people's diffidence
towards taking the project up.

Anyway, thanks for letting me vent on that subject for a bit.

Moof
-- 
Giles Antonio Radford, alias Moof
"Too old to be a chicken and too young to be a dirty old man"
Serving up my ego over at <http://metamoof.net/>