[Twisted-Python] Evangelism notes...

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

Stephen Waterbury wrote:

> Although I missed the IRC
> conversation, Mike's email certainly described a situation
> that anyone would have found frustrating -- and to me it did
> not appear to be an indictment of Twisted so much as simply a
> cautionary tale, and a useful one.  It's reality.

A grim reality indeed.  I myself have been in this situation (and even 
been accused of being a shyster!) and it is a very hard one to get out of.

As Steve points out, there is a general-purpose learning here, but there 
is also the issue that given Twisted's technological maturity, users are 
beginning to expect a certain level of polish and sophistication from 
our web presence, our marketing materials and our documentation which 
just isn't there.

Worse, this is a long-standing problem I don't see any effort underway 
to rectify it.  Other open-source projects have gotten to this point and 
found huge, helpful teams of busy bees to fix the website, keep the 
documents up to date, wrangle the release notes and annotate the 
development process.  Some projects are worse - I've recently had an 
experience with the linux cifs client project website that made me feel 
really good about our web presence :-) - but we could do better.

That said, as it is I think the Twisted team is doing a great job at 
making Twisted, and we don't have any more resources or people to spend 
on other stuff.  That's not to say we can't spot-fix the biggest 
problems with our website (like the API documentation problem) but ... 
where do these helpful people come from for other projects?  I would 
estimate that Twisted has tens of thousands of users by now, but the 
community is still oddly silent.

I'm genuinely baffled as to how to proceed.  Is there anyone out there 
who can contribute some significant time to updating our "professional" 
presence on the web and elsewhere?