[Twisted-Python] removing unsupported reactors in twisted 2.6: qt, corefoundation, threadedselect, wx

Brian Granger ellisonbg.net at gmail.com
Fri Sep 29 00:27:36 MDT 2006


I am on the IPython development team and one of the features of
IPython that is highly praised by users is its ability to use various
GUI toolkits interactively (wc, qt3, qt4, tk, gtk).  Currently, this
is not done using Twisted...but we are completely redesigning IPython
from the ground up to use Twisted to allow us to have IPython run
remotely, and lots of other interesting things.

One of the reason that we went with Twisted is that it looked like it
would be easy to integrate Twisted with the various GUI run loops - a
feature we need to continue to support.  We did some basic tests with
wx and threadedselect reactor and it worked well for what we
tried....but that was when tsr first came out and I guess it has never
matured enough to be stable.

I completely understand the desire to have code that passes tests
(especially reactors).  But I think the importance of these GUI
reactors is being greatly underestimated if they are under
consideration for removal.  Minimally, they should remain somewhere in
the repository and be well documented as to why they are there and
their history.  I don't have time to dig into this code right, but
eventually, I will need to come back to this and get our code working
with lots of different toolkits.

I guess I would vote to leave them in, but clearly and verbosely
document their status.  This will encourage folks to work on them
whereas removing them will lead people to simply create more half
baked GUI reactors.




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