[Twisted-Python] Evangelism notes...

[Christopher Armstrong]

On 5/5/05, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
> 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?

(This contains my thoughts on Twisted's state in general, this thread,
and a response to this particular point from Glyph):

As it stands, I'm pretty embarassed about the state of Twisted, and
I'm really sympathetic for Mike. Personally, I'm truly sorry I had to
drop a lot of polish from the Twisted 2.0 release; I decided to make
it a higher priority to get it out the door (its release cycle was
nearing Debian scales) than to get API docs building, for example.

While there are a lot of docs, and people who claim "Twisted has no
docs!" should be stabbed in the face, the level of usefulness in the
docs isn't that, well, useful, despite Mary's excellent effort. Not
only that, the code is also really nasty in certain areas, trial being
particularly relevant, but certainly not the only area. Trial is
something I've worried about for a while and have eventually just lost
all hope of general usability for, if you're not a Twisted expert.

To respond to your question, glyph, the only thing I can imagine
helping Twisted a significant amount right now is if some company
employing a Twisted hacker would give that Twisted hacker half a day a
week to *generally* maintain Twisted. Just those 4.5 focussed hours a
week would help an amazing amount, I reckon. Not just working on the
web site and docs, but the code as well, like fixing bugs in the
tracker. Of course, most of those companies that employ us do pay us
for developing certain contributions to Twisted, but that's not really
benefitting the project as a whole, it's just benefitting very small
niches within it.

Unfortunately, all of the companies employing Twisted hackers (Divmod,
Nunatak, ITA, and some others) are either too poor or don't care
enough about Twisted to make that offer.

Barring that, maybe a horde of uni students with tons of time on their
hands could help.

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