On 2011-04-07, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
I am +1 on this idea. I like rdf. My question is now: is there an rdf parser lib that is available on python2.4+ which can either be gently embedded within twisted, or used as a dependency?
You're welcome to try and do this; I'm not particularly interested in blocking it or holding it up, but I don't think that changing the input format actually solves any real problems. I guess I will hold it up if you can't convince me that I'm wrong about that, and demonstrate an actual problem that it solves :-). You still have to define all the same classes in order to get a plugin, unless we change some of that too - which has nothing to do with the metadata format at all.
I think the way to avoid caching issues in general is to generate the packaging metadata from the source earlier in advance (i.e. at development time, and check it in with the source code, like you would do with a Cython-generated C file or something), not to just mess around with it in a text editor.
I think that there is a benefit to sticking with a format that people very much dislike editing. Having separately manually-edited metadata introduces an opportunity for the metadata to diverge from the reality of the code. Making this easy to edit manually means making it more likely that people will think that they need to introduce some manual tweaks. If it's a huge pain to actually generate the metadata without running a tool that inspects the code, it's less likely that someone will feel the need to get clever.
I was just thinking about this. It would be very easy to write a single twisted/plugins/rdf_plugins.py file that scans for non-python metadata defined plugins and creates them. That way twisted doesn't need to depend on an RDF lib, and this can be a 'third party' outside-of-twisted package that if you want to use, you just specify it as a dependancy along with the rest of the things that your project depends on. ... I like this idea for a variety of reasons. -- Regards, Stephen Thorne Development Engineer Netbox Blue