First off, thanks for answering my e-mail so thoroughly! I even had a lightbulb moment with your "nevow/plugins is just a directory" comment (though now I'm thinking "but why does it use an __init__.py then?" - but I'm letting it go for now). As for your questions, I attempt to answer below. On Jun 18, 2007, at 12:00 PM, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:

setup.py is basically fully supported. If you find bugs in it, we will do our best to fix them. easy_install isn't really supported at all; please don't suggest it or anything related to setuptools.

Got it - I guess the failure to install javascripts really is a "real" bug then... but I've reported it already.

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3a) So, for example, after getting the thing working with the stock nevow/plugins directory, I standardized on having a local nevow/ plugins directory as a sibling of my tac file. I would suggest this be the recommended (or at least an alternative) method described in the wiki - this keeps all example files bundled under the same root dir. This also allows the possibility of bundling a tar or zip of an athena package, you un-archive it, and the example just works with twistd -ny example.tac from where it sits. (well, you need to alter the /path/to/your/file to sibpath(__file__, 'mymodule.js')).

I'm not totally clear on what you're suggesting here. As described on the wiki, the plugin system does let you keep all of your source files beneath one directory. Maybe I'm not understanding your concern, or maybe you're still missing something about how plugins work. Could you describe this issue further?

An example is probably more useful. I've put something here for you: http://www.keepopen.com/files/athena-example.tar.bz2 You can just un-archive that and immediately run `twistd -ny myelement.tac` (and you can check those files with a quick diff against the default Athena tutorial files to see the very few changes - basically those described above). Anyway, I'll admit that you're not forced to learn as much my way!

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3b) I would go a step further and suggest that, as in zope, a way to create "instances" be created. This would just mean populating a directory with things like a plugins direcotry, a js dir for nevow.athena.autoJSPackage to load and other stuff I haven't learned about yet. A set of scripts localized for that instance would add the appropriate root to the python path before running. Or, you could just require people to run twistd from the root dir of the bundle. This would be remarkably similar to the "solution" for 3a.

Requiring extra programs in order to run the actually interesting program doesn't interest me very much. Beyond this, I'm not really sure how this suggestion differs much from the current system, except that it explicitly makes environment setup something that goes into a helper script, rather than relying on each user to have an environment which is "correctly" configured. Perhaps the documentation should go into more detail about what Nevow considers a "correct" environment?

Agreed - maybe some of the "agreed" changes to the wiki will go some way towards this. I was thinking of something more like a helper script. But I'm beginning to understand that if you're using twisted, you're probably doing something complicated... so you should probably think about things before you do them :) Maybe an environment recipe collection would be nice.

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3d) Speaking of strange .js includes, some system (correctly?) associates the nevow/empty.js file with most Nevow classes. But for root classes, you also get these __init__.js associations, which are non-existent *.js files. Is this a bug?

Hmm, could be. Can you describe this further?

-- import nevow.athena jsd.getModuleForName('MyModule') # or whatever print jsd.mapping -- yeilds (among many other things): { ...... u'Divmod': '/Users/dav/Desktop/SecurMe/dev/Nevow/nevow/js/Divmod/ __init__.js', u'Divmod..svn': '/Users/dav/Desktop/SecurMe/dev/Nevow/nevow/empty.js', u'Divmod..svn.prop-base': '/Users/dav/Desktop/SecurMe/dev/Nevow/nevow/ empty.js' .....} These "empty.js" files occur if and only if we're mapping to a .svn directory. So, I guess this is just a side-effect of my using a svn checkout. But it's still weird. That emtpy.js file does exist - it's empty. The __init__.js entries refer to non-existent files.

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5) Why do all examples have twistd -noy, when -y implies -o?

Historic reasons. The people writing these wiki pages probably still have finger memory from before -y implied -o. :) Feel free to fix this.

I see no need to remove history! Thanks again, Dav