[Twisted-web] web2 log patch

[Ed Suominen]

I've expressed my admiration for the Twisted project and the brilliance
of its developers on numerous occassions.  I like to think that my
background in patenting things gives me an eye for spotting innovative
work, and there's a *lot* of innovation going on with Twisted that,
thankfully, Glyph et al. have essentially given to the public for its
free use.

I hope that background gives me a little room to concur in some of the
criticism being aired here.  Perhaps we are long overdue for the kind of
hearing that Andrea is creating with his willingness to speak his mind. 
The Twisted team is great about sticking to good programming practices
and showing professionalism and maturity in certain cases but comes
across far differently in many others.  The religious fervor around unit
tests is a positive example, but the goofy naming conventions (jelly,
banana, manhole, etc.) that don't impart much if any information to the
source code reader are a very contrary case in point.  Andrea points out
another example below; there's a lot of just plain crud and useless
amusements littering up the SVN tree, yet many classes and methods in
the code are devoid of meaningful docstrings.

I once made the mistake of trying to check out SVN/branches -rHEAD and
found that there are several *gigabytes* of utterly worthless cruft in
there, the vast majority of which will never, ever be touched.  A huge
debate on IRC ensued about the wisdom of keeping abandoned stuff in the
HEAD revision of *any* SVN repository.  You can guess what my viewpoint
was, and I figured it fit well into the "do everything excellently even
to the point of pain" vision of the Twisted developers, but I was wrong
about that.

I even saw a bit of this contradictory zeitgeist on the #twisted IRC
channel recently, when someone was criticized for off topic posts about
more general Python stuff.  I pointed out that there is a lot of utter
nonsense on the IRC channel, including a lot of frankly silly,
repetitive stuff about poking, eating shoulders, stabbing in the eye, etc.

Sure, this is all free software and we're all largely in it to have some
fun, but I think there's some reasonable grounds for not-always positive
comments from the user base, and that hardly is "harming the community."

Best regards, Ed

Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

>On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 09:58:42PM +0100, Valentino Volonghi wrote:
>  
>
>>I'm sorry to say this but... given your latest behavior I'd be happy if you
>>stopped using twisted at all since you are actually harming the community
>>instead of making it better. Maybe more time spent on unittests, bug trackers
>>and documentation or source code could have done better than the last 10-15
>>emails.
>>    
>>
>
>If stuff like is checked into SVN trunk (instead of the file logging
>feature I posted!), it means I'm not the only one that could spend his
>time better.
>
>http://svn.twistedmatrix.com/cvs/trunk/doc/fun/Twisted.Quotes?r1=15551&r2=15652&p1=trunk/doc/fun/Twisted.Quotes&p2=trunk/doc/fun/Twisted.Quotes
>
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>  
>