[Twisted-Python] twisted.protocols.telnet or twisted.conch.telnet?

Christopher Armstrong radeex at gmail.com
Sun Mar 19 21:43:37 EST 2006


On 3/19/06, James Schend <blakeyrat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> One of the reasons to use a library, from my perspective, is that the
> interfaces can remain constant while the internals can be patched to
> ensure there are no bugs/security problems.  For instance, when libpng
> had that buffer overflow last year, that single library was updated to
> correct the problem without affecting the functioning of any of the
> hundreds of programs that used it.  It would be nice if the same could
> be done with Twisted but, as there is not currently a stable interface
> to it, that is impossible.


You said a bunch of things about how great it is to share code, and then
made a weird assertion at the end about how some code in Twisted can't
provide those great things. I'm not seeing the logical connection. Why can't
we fix bugs, even security holes, just because the API is marked "unstable"?
The only thing an "unstable" marker means that we are allowing ourselves the
freedom of *also* changing the interface of the library. Anyway, as Itamar
said, we always try to keep interfaces backwards compatible, even if they're
marked as "unstable". The "unstable" marker does not say "we will ignore
backwards compatibility", it is "if there are really good reasons, we might
might break the interface". The only reason the *old* telnet implementation
wasn't marked unstable was that nobody had even gotten around to adding a
"stability" marker to it.

Anyway, as it comes down to it, you're telling us to do things that we can't
do without funding or more developer time.  Even if there are thousands of
developers who feel the same way, that doesn't change anything. Regardless,
I still strongy suggest that you're reading way too much into the "API
stability: unstable" marker, and I encourage you to use and help improve the
Telnet code in Conch.

--
Christopher Armstrong
International Man of Twistery
http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/
http://twistedmatrix.com/
http://canonical.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/attachments/20060319/1db7597a/attachment.htm 


More information about the Twisted-Python mailing list