[Twisted-Python] [ANN] Foolscap-0.2.6 released

Brian Warner warner at lothar.com
Tue May 6 22:27:59 EDT 2008


> With all respect (as I am very interested and excited by the work  
> being done with Foolscap), I have to ask if it is still accurate to  
> market Foolscap as the 'successor' or 'replacement' for PB.

Fair enough. In the early days (um, 5 years ago? wow), we called this project
PB2. I moved it out of the Twisted SVN tree when the development policies
began to diverge too far (UQDS vs experimental+fast-moving code). I renamed
it to Foolscap at about the same time because of just the sort of uncertainty
that you mentioned, and because sticking with twisted.pb2 was an installation
headache (namespace packages, etc).

At PyCon, the sort of communal marketing position that we seemed to wind up
in (i.e. the set of statements that, once uttered, weren't immediately
corrected or contradicted by everyone else in the room) was that there's a
spectrum, from AMP to PB to Foolscap, in roughly increasing order of
featurefullness/size/complexity. While I see places where I'd use AMP instead
of the others, personally at this point I don't see any reasons to use PB
over Foolscap. But of course I feel more comfortable using Foolscap than
anyone else in the world :-).

I stopped paying attention to PB tickets years ago, and fortunately more
diligent people than me have stepped in and fixed them, so PB is in a better
shape than it was before. It still can't do everything that Foolscap can, and
is unlikely to, because, well, that's what Foolscap is for. But PB is not
going anywhere soon, so if you're intersted in building something that
doesn't require anything outside of the twisted tree, and you don't want
capability-oriented encryption, third-party references, eventual-sends,
adaptor-based third-party serialization, sealers/unsealers, or promises, then
PB is for you.

I still suspect that Foolscap may find its way into twisted/foolscap/ some
day, but I'm not pushing it, and I think it needs to be a lot more mature
first (i.e. I need to be content with seeing the rate of change drop
drastically, as befits anything under the UQDS discipline).

cheers,
 -Brian




More information about the Twisted-Python mailing list