[Twisted-Python] Evangelism notes...

[Bob Ippolito]

On May 4, 2005, at 4:08 PM, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:

>     * Project was delivered, paid for, and has been running in
>       production for a few weeks, but 2 reported bugs cropped up
>           o To fix one, needed to update to 2.0 (deferred object
>             cleanup)... this caused rather a lot of upset, as the
>             sysadmins were upset about such a huge package needing  
> to be
>             updated (and they tried to do just the core packages  
> first,
>             which doubled the work-load involved in preparing that
>             update versus using Sumo)
>           o Fixing the other was no big deal, except that something in
>             2.0 changed how the test-suite was running so that it now
>             hung on completion...

That's why it's better if you don't install Twisted, just make its  
source code part of your project.  That's what you should be doing  
for just about any dependency, especially those where you don't need  
extension modules.

>     * Now, at this point there had been serious conversations just an
>       hour earlier during a management meeting about replacing Twisted
>       for 2 separate projects.  The entire company is watching as  
> we go
>       to fix the *trivial* error while we're together after the
>       meeting... but the test suite won't complete.  Must be something
>       wrong with the background thread not exiting thinks I.

Debugging with an audience?  What the hell were you thinking?  Don't  
do that.

>     * At which point my colleague (lead on this project) got well and
>       truly fed up and decided to dump Twisted and rewrite the project
>       in plain-old-Python.

The deferred/generator stuff is probably "plain-old-looking" enough  
to be used by a programmer who isn't already used to the Twisted  
style of programming, with caveats of course.

-bob