[Twisted-Python] Progress report on splitting packages

[Itamar Shtull-Trauring]

On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 21:58, Christopher Armstrong wrote:

> It was decided that doing package names like this would be too 
> problematic. Unfortunately, Python isn't as cool as Java. The name was 
> changed to lowdown because "news" is a bad top-level package name and 
> "twistednews" and "tnews" and various permutations so forth were also 
> lame. Also, "Low Down" is cool. Get it? The LOW DOWN??? The NEWS??? Ha Ha!

One problem with leaving it as twisted.news in future releases as Andrew
suggests in a later email is that we lose our emphasis on the fact that
it's a separate release with separate versions. Assume following
scenario - we have lowdown 0.1 and lowdown 0.2, which are API
incompatible. We want to be very clear that lowdown 0.1 can still be
used on latest Twisted core, that you don't have to go in lockstep.

So, looking at code - is twisted.foo part of core twisted and thus
probably pretty stable or is it a separate package? What expectations
can I have of API stability?

Partially this is just Python conventions. Separate packages go in
separate namespaces. Possibly Java's system is better, but if it doesn't
really match our users' expectations then we're just going to confuse
them if we use it.

Then again, maybe we're just being stupid and we should stick to
Java-style "twisted.foo", so "twisted.news" with a "twisted.news.nntp".
Who else thinks that's a good idea?

> twisted.xish -> No idea.
>    No idea. I imagine this will just be made a part of the Jabber
>    package, whatever that is.

Yeah. Jabber will probably be in the Words pacakge, so xish will end up
there (unless people tell us it is generally applicable).

> twisted.trial -> ???
>    This one is going to have to require some thought, since *all* the
>    other packages depend on it, but I think that people do want to split
>    it out.

When Glyph and I did the original break out document (Glyph, could you
forward it to the list?) we decided this ought to stay in core, because
everything depends on it, including core :) Also it requires the
reactor, internally. It's not worth breaking out. 

-- 
Itamar Shtull-Trauring    http://itamarst.org
Looking for a job -- http://itamarst.org/resume.html