[Twisted-Python] twisted.positioning: status report and request for comments/feedback

[Santiago Aguiar]

Hello list!

This is my first post, and I would like to join in the discussion :).

Laurens Van Houtven wrote:
> Okay, I'll do that as soon as people have reviewed the changes
> suggested in your last mail, so that I know I got it right :-)
>   
I agree with Glyph suggestions.

NMEAAdapter should delegate to a IPositionReceiver (which should be a 
Receiver, right? It's called Provider, maybe I'm missing something?), 
and avoid having to make the receiver inherit from the NMEAAdapter 
(which seems to be the case now, by looking at 
NMEAAdapter._sentence_received getattr(self, callbackName)). There will 
probably be tons of different GPS protocols (I sometimes work on 
tracking systems, and truth is many trackers don't send NMEA data but a 
proprietary protocol), and you don't want to have to subclass each to 
handle data from multiple sources.

I also would refrain from using getattr tricks on the NMEA sentence 
classes. For me, the first line of python doc (specially on twisted!) is 
doing dir(obj) (and some IDEs/docgen tools actually do something like 
this for completion). getattr tricks and similar constructions makes it 
impossible to do this. It could be OK if you use getattr to handle an 
unknown case (for example, if you want to delegate based on whether the 
class has a method or not, even if in twisted interfaces world this 
wouldn't be the way to do, it I think), but in this case you know 
exactly what fields will the NMEA sentences have (and they won't change 
much!), so you could code them, even if this require much more code. 
It's the old motto of "write once maintain always" ;).

You could also do other tricks, like update the class __dict__, so it 
would show as a regular field when the object is created, or dinamically 
create the class (like is done for TCPServer and friends, ugh), but 
really, it could be better to just write it.

Thanks for the code!! :)