On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 2:28 AM Ian Haywood <ian@haywood.id.au> wrote:
On 22/02/2022 7:44 am, Glyph wrote:
I’m in a similar place myself. I could probably put more effort forth if we could get a bit more of a small commitment from more other developers.  I do not want to spend my time as a full-time unpaid twisted maintainer, or simply slogging through reviewing old tickets while never developing any interesting new features myself.  But, it seems like unless I do, then my own feature development will simply languish forever at the end of a year-long queue.

It makes me wish we could have a sort of open source mutually-assured maintenance system, where we all put in some number of hours and get some small reward (like bragging rights, a little badge?) out of meeting that commitment.  But that also requires some volunteers[1] to go build it.

This trial maintenance is also something I’m definitely interested in, but I don’t think just a small commitment from me and JP would be quite enough to get it somewhere meaningful.

I would like to contribute more to twisted, but I've found the review process discouraging. I suppose I would call myself a "frustrated twisted developer".

maintaining trial is beyond my knowledge but are there any other small desired tasks ?

[I've not felt competent to do code reviews until I'd had *one* PR accepted]


Hi Ian!

I think "maintaining trial" is a big job to ask anyone to volunteer to do.  I hope that "help maintain trial" is a little bit more reasonable - if we can get 3 or 4 people involved.

Also, it has now been so long since anyone active on Twisted worked on trial that to - at least to some extent - maintaining it is beyond anyone's knowledge.  However, it's also not the most complex piece of software ever so for someone interested who has worked on it in the past, it will probably come back fairly quickly and for someone interested who has not worked on it before, the learning curve should not be particularly painful.

I deeply sympathize with the way the moribund review workflow serves as a strongly discouraging force in Twisted development.  This is part of the reason I want to try to raise some interest in a specific area of Twisted before diving in.  A few people working in one area can get a lot more done than a few people each working in their own separate areas.

I believe that current project policy is that a non-committer may approve a committer's PR - so technically, you and I could go off and make progress on trial (because at least one of us is a committer).  I know glyph expressed a willingness to contribute too - and I won't turn that down - but it would be great to have one or two other people get involved as well.  I think there's a lot of relatively straightforward work to do on trial and I'd rather glyph spend any Twisted hacking time he might have on more complex or subtle areas.

As far as small, desirable work - I still think switching trial to coverage.py would be a good thing (and I don't think anyone in the thread thought that specifically was a bad idea, rather people weren't convinced working on trial at all was a good idea).

I don't know exactly how easy that switch will be - it wouldn't surprise me if there is some non-obvious plumbing involved.  All the pieces look straightforward though.

Apart from that, a couple other trial issues that bothered me recently are:
I think these are probably smaller so might be better starting places.

So ... anyone else up for focusing some attention on trial?

Jean-Paul