[Twisted-web] A few questions need answering

[Christopher Armstrong]

Alex Levy wrote:
> I'm going to back up Richard and Ed, because I feel like people might be
> inclined to just pass their emails by. This is very important.
> 
> Here we have two users who are expressing serious reservations about
> using Twisted or Nevow because they don't have any details on how we
> plan to split twisted.web. I can understand their concern: nobody likes
> being in the dark.

One point I'd like to make is that Nevow has, since its inception, been 
pretty API-unstable. *twisted.web* has been stable for a while, and 
there's no reason not to use it. Nevow is obviously still something you 
need to watch closely if you want to use.

I promise there will be backwards compatibility for twisted.web. I'll 
explain more below...

> 1) What will happen to twisted.web? It's a complex module, and doing
> reverse-imports (the way LowDown is doing with twisted.news) might get
> pretty rocky. Do we have any guarantees that, for the foreseeable
> future, the existing twisted.web will not change, and people can
> continue to develop applications using twisted.web?

'from twisted import web' *will remain backwards compatible*. I'll 
personally see to that. :-)

> 2) When everything's finished, how drastically different will the APIs
> be? Are we talking about a simple "move code over, clean up a few loose
> ends," or is this going to be a massive reorganization and refactoring
> of everything web-related?

That's a question that foom and nevow-twisted.web-forkers can answer. 
nevow changed a bunch of core twisted.web stuff, and foom is rewriting 
the HTTP support.

> 
> And, most importantly...
> 
> 3) What sort of timeframe are we looking at?

Ha! I mock your assumptions that someone actually has any idea. ;-)

> Really, I think everyone is most interested in the last question. How
> long will the split take? If it's going to happen gradually over several
> months, what should people who are considering using twisted.web or
> Nevow do? If it's going to happen in the next two weeks... well, then,
> it's about time someone stood up and said so!

twisted.web split is going to be tricky, since people are rewriting it 
at the same time. It will probably be a short while before the split 
actually occurs, and we're probably going to have to put a bunch of BC 
code in twisted/web/.

But like I said, people shouldn't worry about using *twisted.web*. It 
will remain backwards compatible. I can't say anything about the 
backwards compatibility of all the slightly different APIs in nevow; 
that's not my concern.

> Wiki: <http://divmod.org/users/wiki.twistd/nevow/moin.cgi>

-- 
  Twisted | Christopher Armstrong: International Man of Twistery
   Radix  |          Release Manager,  Twisted Project
---------+           http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/
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