[Twisted-Python] threadedselctreactor and releases

[glyph at divmod.com]

On Mon, 03 Oct 2005 12:36:30 +0200, Moof <moof at metamoof.net> wrote:
>Warning: mild rant venting frustration from a user, here. I'm not trying to
>offend, but I may have failed in this respect. Forgive me if I've failed in
>this aim.

I wasn't terribly offended, at least, so I guess you win.

>I've seen it mentioned quite often on the IRC channel recently, and it's
>starting to get a bit silly now, I'm talking, in this case, about people
>saying "you want to use wx? use threadedselectreactor".

In the next release, wxreactor should be totally abandoned (since it doesn't work) and the interface should be supported using wxreactor.  It's correct that people are saying this.

>I'd hate to have to release a wx-dependent piece of software (...)
>Yes, I am aware that most of you are volunteers. (...)
>You guys are doign great work (...)

Here is the problem in this particular case: A group of volunteers - most of whom don't care one whit about WX, and would, in fact, like to discourage its use (so long as its event loop remains the disaster which makes discussions like this necessary) are being charged (by you, and others) with making a release of the software they are developing easy to use with WX.

As you wrote without trying to offend, please don't take offense either, but this is the way I see things.

I don't care about wxwindows.  I don't like it, I don't ever intend to use it and I certainly don't need to dedicate my own *extremely* sparse time for working on Twisted to improving it somehow.  The release process is a disaster right now, which is unfortunate, but that is hardly at the top of my priority list either, since I don't mind deplying out of an SVN tag.

Frustrated users like yourself need to make a decision as to how to deal with that frustration.  Either find a Twisted developer to make your issues go away and pay them (paypal to glyph at twistedmatrix.com, please mention the bug number in http://twistedmatrix.com/bugs ), OR, better yet, find some time of your own to volunteer to fix the specific issues which are bothering you.  Rants like the one you wrote are helpful if the audience has plenty of time but not enough direction.

Frankly, I, and everyone else on this mailing list who has commit access to Twisted, has done *more* than enough for the F/OSS community already without seeing anywhere near adequate compensation.  We - employees of Divmod and Nunatak in particular - are tapped out for time, and I, at least, have *PLENTY* of direction, since I am now working on the following open source projects: Twisted, Nevow, Axiom, Vertex, Mantissa, Epsilon, Combinator, and ClickChronicle.

If nobody on the Twisted team is fixing your problem already, that is everyone who might be fixing it has things more important to them that they need to work on.  It is an extremely time-poor project with broken release infrastructure, so it should not be surprising that it doens't get released often.

It seems that the root cause of this conflict, since all open source projects are always strapped for time, is the unfortunate nature of the "split".  It a good idea: it was supposed to make releasing individual projects easier by reducing the amount of work required for each, but it seems that what happened was that the initial attempt failed (the one using zpkgtools) and the resulting second attempt was steamrolled out the door as fast as possible but left us with a massive amount of cleanup work that hasn't been done yet.  There are still lots of broken links on the website, and there is still no clear division of responsibility for maintainers to make, or even propose individual releases.

My specific suggestion to you would be to start contributing patches against the automated build/release scripts so that all a Twisted release manager has to do when the release is ready is "release-twisted --core 2.5.2 'This release fixes several issues in tsreactor spotted with the previous release'".  Once this is fixed then the procedural problems of doing a release should be quite a bit easier to deal with.  Speaking of which, I don't even think we *have* a release manager now, want to volunteer for that?

I suggest this rather than your other recommendations as to breaking out a separate tsreactor release because Twisted *SHOULD* be a working, self-contained whole.  Right now there are lots of holes and lots of bugs, but we shouldn't distribute separate "backports" of every fix and additional component because making a release is hard.  We should make making a release easier and just do that more often.