Hilarious dream-logic (was Re: [Twisted-Python] [patch] (etc)

Andrea Arcangeli andrea at cpushare.com
Fri May 19 00:18:18 EDT 2006


On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 03:15:40AM +0200, Terry Jones wrote:
> But, apparently, Twisted isn't that bad after all. It still seems like it's
> worth using. In fact, it's SO good why not FORK THE CODE just so we can
> quickly apply a few patches and keep using it?

I've dozen thousand lines written in twisted. Moving away from it would
require a large rewrite. Maintaining my fixes locally for now is a lower
effort than rewriting the whole thing.

> deliberately destructive attitude to a project which you are nevertheless
> happy to run off with in a fork. It's not as though the Twisted developers

Happy to run it isn't really accurate. Simpler to keep running it even
if unreliable against malicious clients is more accurate.

> My impression is the following: Andrea, having not followed project
> guidelines and rules because he doesn't have the time, having not been
> treated like a coding God for whom others will naturally rush to do the
> mundane tasks in order to receive his patches, and being unwilling to go
> the extra few yards to get his patches (eventually) incorporated, is now
> using his formerly precious time to go out of his way to undermine the
> project.

My impression is that most of my fixes I did over the last years were
getting merged for some time. As far as I can tell things derailed when
I didn't like the fact that epsilon was becoming a dependency for nevow.
I was nevow user at the time. You think it's good that next time there
is a twisted bug you've to upgrade epsilon instead of upgrading twisted
in the first place?  Upgrading twisted would fix the bug for _all_ apps
and not only the apps shipped by divmod.

When I noticed a combination of weirdness (to mention one more, the new
axiom api that cannot work with real DBMS in the async way because it
doesn't return deferreds) I tried to find a way out of nevow (also
motivated by the fact formless was declared obsolete and so I had to
rewrite part of the code anyway) to avoid depending on divmod decisions
on the future of nevow. Thankfully web2 was already usable (even if
quite buggy) and I found tons of advantages by moving to cheetah and the
result was between 2 to 10 times faster depending on the webpage. The
code was reduced as well. I should have done that change regardless of
epsilon and formless infact. But unfortunately there is a post that
explicitly says that twisted-web is not a mailing list to discuss
cheetah integrations:

	http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-web/2006-January/002371.html

So then I fail to see why twisted-web mailing list is on twistedmatrix
domain if only divmod projects like nevow should be discussed. Can you
provide a reasonable answer? I never asked cause I think I already knew
the answer.

While I acknowledge I wasn't the best bugfix submitter (and obviously
I'm no coding God either), I'm definitely not trying to undermine
twisted, quite the opposite I'd like twisted to evolve and integrated
with not-invented-here technologies, but I fail to see how it can evolve
and integrate with cheetah or/and django in this environment.

Note that Guido himself did an evaluation of the templating engines an
last time I read his blogs, he said he liked django most after comparing
it with Cheetah. So I don't think I deserve to be considered as an
heretic if I want to integration with other template engines (for
example cheetah would get an huge gain by learning to talk with
deferreds, I assume for django is similar). Cheetah for example could
handle deferreds transparently at zero runtime cost thanks to its
compilation stage (dunno about django).  It would be great to talk about
these things if only we were allowed. I created the cpushare-twisted
list as a place to talk about those things that seems not appropriate to
talk about here.

So long, but I hope this clarifies my impressions.




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