[Twisted-Python] Evangelism notes...

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
...

> Mike, I'm sorry that Twisted was a part of such a horrible experience
> for you!  Thanks for sharing the experience, but evangelism tip #1
> that I get from the initial reading is from the real-time, public bit
> at the end.

Wasn't a truly horrible experience.  The company's fairly laid back, it
was just disappointing.

>   - Do not ever, ever use IRC in a public forum to solve a problem in
> real-time.  In fact, do not ever use any support mechanism in a public
> forum unless you or your company has a paid relationship with the
> people on the other end of the wire.

Um, I hope you're joking.  Do not *ever* use a public support mechanism
without a paid relationship?  So is everyone on IRC paid up?  Or is it
not a support mechanism?  Or is it just unwise to ever *use* Twisted
IRC; it should just be considered a waste of time?  Absolutes like that
are kind of extreme, no?  Maybe you meant to say only for real-time
problem solving... still seems to make the immediacy of the forum
somewhat pointless, no?  It did actually solve the problem, btw, and at
least the search for the docs was cut short at 20 minutes.

If that was intended more as a "who do you think you are, you've not
paid us anything", okay, accepted.  I'd been thinking of myself as a
member of the community trying to sell "our" product to the world, I
should have looked at it from the other side.

We've (and I've) *tried* to contribute back to the Twisted community
with introductory lectures at PyGTA, various pieces of documentation and
releasing TwistedSNMP, but it's perfectly true that we've made no
monetary arrangements for support.  Fact is that we operate on a
shoe-string budget to keep costs low for our customers and try to
participate actively in the Open Source community to compensate others
for the assistance we often get.  I apologise if I went over the line in
asking where the reference documents have moved ;) :) .

Seriously, I didn't even think of asking in IRC, it was suggested by
another colleague between stifling guffaws... maybe he was out to get me
by tricking me into exactly this folly ;) .

>   - Do not ever expect to be able to fix a threading bug in less than
> 2 days.

:)  That was obviously the root problem.

Peace, out,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com