Mailman 3 April 2007 - Twisted

Re: [Twisted-Python] Trial docs?
by Terry Jones April 10, 2007

April 10, 2007

>>>>> "glyph" == glyph <glyph(a)divmod.com> writes: glyph> On 01:38 am, terry(a)jon.es wrote: >> Within the last month, someone mentioned to me that Trial was one of the >> better-documented components of Twisted. glyph> Terry, if I was the one who committed this terrible crime against glyph> you, I apologize. Nope, not you. Also I don't think the person was necessarily wrong, they just didn't also tell me _where_ it was documented. glyph> The … [View More]

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[Twisted-Python] Trial docs?
by Terry Jones April 10, 2007

April 10, 2007

Within the last month, someone mentioned to me that Trial was one of the better-documented components of Twisted. I just decided to write a couple of quick unit tests for talking to a Twisted web2 server. No problem, I thought, I'll just dig up that Trial documentation... - Go to http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ and click on Twisted Projects. Click on Twisted Trial. There's nothing there, just a link to thoughts on future dev and a link into the tracker. - I notice a DOCS link at … [View More]the top right. Non-obvious, but that must be it. But no, this takes me to the top of the Twisted documentation and I see no link for Trial. - But there's a FAQ, so I go there. There's one mention of trial, but it's not to do with documentation. - Google "twisted trial documentation". There are some one year old links to a page talking about how to improve the Trial documentation via chatting in IRC. I scan the first page of hits - none of them lead me back into the twisted site. - Back on the Twisted site I look for a search box, and there is one. Yay. Enter 'trial' and I get back 76+ pages of hits, the first of which is virtually all trac issue links, plus some mention of monkey patching, which doesn't sound relevant. - Well, I have the Twisted tree checked out, so I'll look there. Nothing. - Maybe there's some documentation in the tarball? Back to the Twisted home page, download, untar, find, nroff -man, etc. There's something, but just invocation options. - I run trial at the command line. More invocation options. I guess we'll all agree that this could be improved. I don't mind reading code. I wish someone would just tell me up front that that's what I should do. Or is it? I really don't know in this case. I just know that if there is any documentation for Trial it's pretty well hidden. Just doing the above and now sending this mail (with the aim of improving things for others) has taken me probably 45 minutes, on top of which my fingers now ache. I wish I could have used all these keystrokes to do other stuff. I think the Trial page at http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedTrial should be changed to say something like this: Documentation: Trial is currently undocumented. However, you can find some information by - Studying the example usage of trial in X project found in the Y directory of the Twisted tarball (or wherever). - Reading the trial manpage in the Twisted tarball, which will show you trial command line invocation arguments. - Reading the source code, which you can find in the Twisted tarball at X, or which you can see in the tracker at Y. Please feel free to contribute, etc. I'm happy to edit the wiki if one of you will fill in the X and Y's in the above. Terry [View Less]

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Re: [Twisted-Python] Trial docs?
by Terry Jones April 10, 2007

April 10, 2007

Hi jml | On 4/10/07, Terry Jones <terry(a)jon.es> wrote: | Thanks for writing such a full email too. This sort of thing really | helps me question why things are as they are, which is a good first | step to improving the documentation. Great. I also always find it useful to have outsiders and first-timers make comments. It's probably impossible to look with fresh eyes at things you've spent a ton of time working on. I know I can't do it - partly through lack of time, energy, inclination … [View More]:-) | > - Go to http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ and click on Twisted Projects. | > Click on Twisted Trial. There's nothing there, just a link to | > thoughts on future dev and a link into the tracker. | | This is an unfortunate situation. Part of the issue is that Trial is a | significantly-sized, relatively independent part of Twisted Core, so | it falls into something of an organisational nether-world. OK, but that wiki page is your chance to say so, or say something. | It's interesting that you didn't consider looking into Twisted's | documentation to find out more about Trial. >From the home page I go to http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/Documentation and I don't see a link for Trial. Part of what's misleading here is that there are explicit links for various projects, and Trial is listed as a project on the page I just came from. So, a specific recommendation: add Trial to the list of projects, and say "Trial is documented in the core documentation" with a link. Following your suggestion, I now click on Core Documentation. On the page I land on, I immediately search for Trial, but there is no hit. Specific rec: add the word Trial somewhere on this page so users and Google etc. can see it. But I do see a link called "Tips for writing tests for Twisted code". Is that or is that not Trial documentation I wonder? The destination page is howto/testing.html and at the top it does look like I've arrived at the right place. Is that what you meant? But after a few sentences it does degenerate into tips that are too advanced. Shouldn't someone tell me for example what Twisted class I should subclass in making a test suite, before telling me to leave the reactor (what reactor? thinks the newbie) as I found it? | > - Back on the Twisted site I look for a search box, and there is one. | > Yay. Enter 'trial' and I get back 76+ pages of hits, the first of | > which is virtually all trac issue links, plus some mention of monkey | > patching, which doesn't sound relevant. | | OK, now that is Trac's fault. You'll notice that the Trac search page | lets you uncheck the "Ticket" and "Changeset" boxes so that you can | just search the wiki. It's not particularly intuitive. Can the default be changed to just search the wiki? Perhaps just on searches from the main page? That looks like it would just be a matter of dropping changeset=on and ticket=on from the URL. I know, that's probably a trac thing, but it might help. | groff -man -Tascii doc/core/man/trial.1 | less Thanks. I'm old :-) And on my machine: $ file /usr/bin/nroff /usr/bin/nroff: Bourne shell script text executable $ grep Emulate /usr/bin/nroff # Emulate nroff with groff. | I'm guessing the confusion here is that you weren't expecting the | Trial docs to be under 'core'? Yes, that's part of it (see above about seeing Trial listed as a project but then not seeing it under the projects on the main doc page). | http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/api/twisted.trial.html So I did! That's great, thanks. It's exactly the kind of doc I'd like to be reading - nicely fomatted and giving confidence that it's clearly machine generated (and therefore stands a chance of being up to date). A link to that page would have really helped. | Right. I think it's a good policy to explicitly recommend reading code | if there aren't any better docs. Me too. And the doc strings in the code are (relatively) pretty good. | Rest assured, this email is definitely valuable. So, although you may | have been able to do better stuff, you are certainly making my job | easier. And vice versa (much more of the vice versa, of course). So thanks back. | Thomas is working on a better Trial document which should solve some | of these problems. The presentation on the website is a separate, and | possibly more pressing issue, which I'll file a bug for. I'll make some interim cosmetic changes to the wiki if you like. (Where interim has its usual meaning: will only be there for a couple of years...) | In the interim, if you have any problems using Trial, you can (almost) | always contact me on IRC. OK, thanks. Terry [View Less]

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[Twisted-Python] Cannot pickle <type 'DB'> objects
by Roland Hedberg April 9, 2007

April 9, 2007

Hi! I've written a system that consists of a central module, one or more receiver modules and one or more sender modules. Different modules might handle different protocols, and this is one of the reasons I choose twisted as framework. But now I've got a problem I don't know how to solve. One of the sender modules is depending on another package and that package opens a sleepycat database at initialization. Which is not playing nice with mktap. So, now when I use mktap I get an exception … [View More]

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[Twisted-Python] Weekly Bug Summary
by exarkun＠twistedmatrix.com April 8, 2007

April 8, 2007

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[Twisted-Python] utils.getProcessOutput lacks uid and gid for IReactorProcess.spawnProcess
by Antonio Bardazzi April 7, 2007

April 7, 2007

utils.getProcessOutput(executable, args=(), env={}, path='.', reactor=None, errortoo=0) I think is useful for getProcessOutput to accepts also uid and gid for spawnProcess IReactorProcess.spawnProcess(processProtocol, executable, args=(), env={}, path=None, id=None, gid=None, usePTY=0, childFDs=None) 17c17 < def _callProtocolWithDeferred(protocol, executable, args, env, path, reactor=None): --- > def _callProtocolWithDeferred(protocol, executable, args, env, path, reactor=None, uid=… [View More]

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[Twisted-Python] twisted 2.5 on Debian
by Manlio Perillo April 7, 2007

April 7, 2007

Hi. Why twisted 2.5 is still not available in Debian? Thanks Manlio Perillo

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Re: [Twisted-Python] Synchronization
by Andrew Francis April 6, 2007

April 6, 2007

Hello Glyph: >Stackless tasklets that "want to run" ought to be >running due to events transpiring. One kind of event >is "time passes" (reactor.callLater), >other types of events are user interaction (like >callbacks in a UI such as GTK) or I/O events >(dataReceived, connectionLost, et. al.) I am still relatively new to Twisted... In the past, I tried using loopingCall. In turn, the task would make a call to stackless.schedule() that would allow waiting tasklets to … [View More]execute. The problem was that certain tests would fail resulting in reactor errors or deferreds would not fire. Also I really don't have an understanding of what happens when a callback calls stackless.schedule(). So I would like to avoid this construct if I can. (I posted all the aforementioned in the "Advice on Writing a Custom Reactor." ) As a note, under the two threads approach, I still lost "deferreds." However placing a time.sleep() after calling a deferred method, would result in the deferred properly functioning. I am operating under the suspicion that there is some issue involving the GIL. This is one of the "issues" I mentioned in my previous post. >There should be no need for native threads in a >Twisted+Stackless universe. Even if all your tasklets >constantly want to be doing work, they should be able >to do that via a tasklet scheduler that is always >running with a 0 callLater timeout. Do you think this >would be possible? Glyph, I modified my web server example (in the Twisted/Stackless code examples repository). Now the code is: reactor.listenTCP(port, MyHttpFactory()) reactor.callLater(1, stackless.schedule) reactor.run() Unfortunately the tick tasklet does not pump out numbers until my web browser makes a request.... (Hopefully) I am doing something wrong? Glyph, once again, I apologise for being a newbie. I thought there should be no need for native threads in a Twisted/Stackless universe too. However by adding an additional thread, my application works, the solution is relatively clean, and I have a better understanding of what is happening. Right now, the important thing is that I am reaping the benefits of Twisted/Stackless which allow me to focus on WS-BPEL specific programming. Without Stackless and Twisted, I couldn't do a fraction of what I am currently achieving. Also by posting my problems in the Stackless mailing list, I found out that there are many other people interested in using Stackless with Twisted. Still I will always be on the lookout for the right Twisted way to do things. Cheers, Andrew ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need Mail bonding? Go to the Yahoo! Mail Q&A for great tips from Yahoo! Answers users. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396546091 [View Less]

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Re: [Twisted-Python] Synchronization techniques
by Andrew Francis April 6, 2007

April 6, 2007

Hello Brian: I have just recently started reading this thread. >1. The interactive python interpreter is a completely >synchronous universe - getting the reactor running in >this context seems like a hack. The only way I have >seen this done is by running the reactor in >a different thread. The problem with this is that it >is inevitable that you end up wanting to do things >with Deferreds in the main thread where user code is >running. But, as I understand it, … [View More]

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[Twisted-Python] Conch filetransfer *client* example?
by matteo acerbi April 5, 2007

April 5, 2007

Hello all! I'm a Twisted *and* Python beginner, so please don't treat me badly. :-) I'm looking for a way to transfer files via SFTP (or SCP) and, as I'm going to use conch to execute commands remotely (already did some working tests), I'd like to use the same package to transfer some files (copying them from the twisted-running host to the remote one). I have nothing more than a ssh server on the remote host, can't even rely on a python interpreter, so please don't suggest me to transfer … [View More]

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