separate trial release (was Re: [Twisted-Python] Twisted Jabber mailinglist)

[Andrew Bennetts]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 12:03:30AM -0400, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
[...]
> >Seriously, why don't we release Trial as a separate project?
> 
> Passing unit tests would be a good start towards that ;)
> 
> Seriously: leaving twisted.protocols.loopback aside, I still think Core 
> depends on Trial because Trial is how you can *tell* if Core is working: 
> you run its tests.

I disagree.  If someone wrote some sort of really shiny debugger that worked
really nicely with Twisted, and so was very helpful as a development tool
for hacking on Twisted, I don't think it would qualify as a dependency of
core.  Much the same way that emacs/vim, epydoc, manhole, and who knows what
else aren't dependencies.

Trial is a valuable tool that all developers almost certainly should have
installed.  That doesn't mean it's a dependency in any useful technical
sense: I can happily delete twisted/trial and still have all my
twisted-using applications I've written or downloaded still work.

The fact that Trial is so clearly of use to other projects in exactly the
same way that it's of use to core is another reason to have it seperate.

Trial and the rest of core are clearly developing at different rates, so
there's possibly even some benefit from decoupling their releases.

So I think if Jonathan wants to release it seperately, I'm happy to let him.

-Andrew.