[Twisted-Python] Subproject releases

[glyph at divmod.com]

On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 14:17:31 -0400, James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:

>This sort of points towards it being a nice idea if the repo was 
>reorganized such that each project was in its own directory  hierarchy, as 
>then it would be much easier to mix-n-match different  branches of different 
>projects. But I'm not going to go there, again,  right now. I still think it 
>could be a good idea but it was discussed  before and rejected.

I remember participating in this initial discussion.

I remember taking some side in it, and arguing strongly for that side.

I'm not sure which one it was, so if I'm responsible for rejecting it I've changed my mind, but if I was arguing in favor of it I'm now even more vociferous :).

The Divmod repository is now organized this way, and we have a tool (Combinator) which keeps PYTHONPATH from exploding into a million pieces that kill you.  For an example of this repository structure see <http://divmod.org/trac/browser/trunk>.

I think that it would be a very good idea to re-organize the Twisted repository this way, especially given the path semantics of the new plugin mechanism.  It is difficult to sanely decide which project plugins for another project ought to be distributed with at this point, and as we move towards more usage of plugins rather than direct imports for integration, this problem is only going to get worse.

I would suggest trunk/TwistedWords trunk/TwistedCore trunk/TwistedNames (etc etc).  Cherry-picked branches would still be a little bit of work to construct, but a reasonable amount (and appropriate local checkout structure could probably also approximate them).

I realize that this has the potential to be a pretty disruptive change.  I'm open to suggestions on when would be a good time, and I have no plans to push hard to get this to happen any time soon.  I do think it would be a good idea eventually, though.