[Twisted-web] how are solving the calls to the children in nevow?

[Donovan Preston]

On Jul 7, 2005, at 6:05 PM, Kieran Holland wrote:

> It is forgotten.  You can say what you like and it will tend not to
> haunt you down the line.  Well, this is a plus for those, such as
> myself, prone to putting their foot in their mouth ;)

I hate using a technical IRC channel without an IRC logbot. That  
said, I've been using #twisted and #twisted.web for the last 4 years  
now. *sigh*

Personally, I would prefer an IRC channel with a logbot, an NNTP  
server for longer, asynchronous discussion, and a web server which  
exposes it all to casual browsers (and google).

The thing that is most valuable about real-time communication in a  
medium like IRC is the iterative refinement of the topic matter. On a  
mailing list, it's too easy to misinterpret what someone was saying  
early on, and waste 20 minutes laboring under an incorrect  
assumption. On IRC, a misassumption is discovered and corrected  
earlier and conversations go through many more rounds of small  
iteration, much like Extreme Programming.

> Pastebins may be Cool, but isn't it actually easier to just "paste"
> into an email?  Valuable code fragments should not be consigned to a
> bin!

Pastebins should also be a part of the permanent record of a  
community. An implementation more like lisppaste would be very nice.  
The ability to have an addressable, color-coded page which  
encapsulates it's own mini-discussion about some code is more  
valuable than emailing back and forth minor edits to examples. One  
thing that is missing is discoverability of paste entries, and  
permanence. I'm willing to host a permanent pastebin on nevow.com,  
but I think we need to add some more discovery features, like  
searching, tagging, hierarchical comments... etc.

It occurs to me that a pastebin, containing iterative history of  
changes to a small example fragment, with a tagging capability like  
delicious or flickr could end up being a self-organizing example  
repository (somewhat like the Python Cookbook, but maybe better  
organized, and like a wiki because anyone can improve the "latest"  
version of the example?)

I certainly have no shortage of ideas for things like this. I really  
need to take a few months to seriously focus on developing tools like  
this for nevow.com.

> It seems to me that IRC is fine for a developer-only piece of
> software, where everyone who uses it hangs out there, but it becomes
> counter-productive if you want to extend the user base.  Isn't that
> what we all want for Nevow?

I agree. IRC is great for smaller communities but a wider range of  
tools is needed for the community to grow. The IRC channel and  
mailing list will have to do for now, but we'll have to use some  
better tools in the future.

> I would be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.

Thanks.

Donovan
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