[Twisted-Python] removing unsupported reactors in twisted 2.6: qt, corefoundation, threadedselect, wx

[glyph at divmod.com]

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 00:27:36 -0600, Brian Granger <ellisonbg.net at gmail.com> wrote:
>I am on the IPython development team and one of the features of
>IPython that is highly praised by users is its ability to use various
>GUI toolkits interactively (wc, qt3, qt4, tk, gtk).  Currently, this
>is not done using Twisted...but we are completely redesigning IPython
>from the ground up to use Twisted to allow us to have IPython run
>remotely, and lots of other interesting things.

Thanks for thinking of Twisted when you did this :).

>I completely understand the desire to have code that passes tests
>(especially reactors).  But I think the importance of these GUI
>reactors is being greatly underestimated if they are under
>consideration for removal.  Minimally, they should remain somewhere in
>the repository and be well documented as to why they are there and
>their history.  I don't have time to dig into this code right, but
>eventually, I will need to come back to this and get our code working
>with lots of different toolkits.

A major complaint that many users have about Twisted is that it is sprawling. I've repeatedly heard complaints that it's very difficult to look at the source tree and have any idea what's going on.  In many cases I think this complaint is miguided, because you don't have to understand everything to use some things, but there's no point in bloating the repository with code that is decaying with each release, which is never looked at by any developers, and which could silently break due to an unrelated internal API change with no test coverage or automated builds to bring anyone's attention to it.

>I guess I would vote to leave them in, but clearly and verbosely
>document their status.  This will encourage folks to work on them
>whereas removing them will lead people to simply create more half
>baked GUI reactors.

I am inviting anyone who would like to improve them to speak up now, and a few people have.  Right now it seems like we have at least a few volunteers who will keep these reactors alive, but of course any additional contribution would be welcome.