Re: Hilarious dream-logic (was Re: [Twisted-Python] [patch] (etc)
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"glyph" == glyph <glyph@divmod.com> writes: glyph> On Thu, 18 May 2006 21:25:07 +0200, Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@cpushare.com> wrote:
Overall using twisted for my project was a mistake. glyph> And yet, and yet, and yet...
Right. That's the part that I find pretty odd. Andrea says that Twisted was a mistake for him, and that it has one severe/major core design problem:
Overall using twisted for my project was a mistake. One major core design problem it has is that it can't pass POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL to the poll syscall unless POLLIN/POLLOUT are set too. This means that if I throttle the I/O I can't notice anymore when a disconnect happens. But the severe core design issues it has
But, apparently, Twisted isn't that bad after all. It still seems like it's worth using. In fact, it's SO good why not FORK THE CODE just so we can quickly apply a few patches and keep using it? On top of generally being a pest, not being willing or making/having the time to follow well-established project guidelines, etc., Andrea decides not just to continue to use Twisted with a few of his own patches applied (which would save plenty of time), while putting more energy into getting his patches integrated, but, instead, to publicly announce a fork, make all the effort to put it online, set up a mailing list, etc. That all seems quite deliberately anti-social and deliberately disruptive and destructive, rather than constructive. Meanwhile I read that "CPUShare-Twisted will try to avoid duplication" - why yes, that's an excellent (i.e. belated and hypocritical) aim for a _forked_ project. It seems that just a little more effort (and a whole lot less than forking, publicizing, putting it online, running servers, svn, etc) could have avoided a hell of a lot more duplication. On top of this nastiness, repeatedly posting URLs of chat room discussion between a bunch of developers is pretty silly, and, again, smacks of a deliberately destructive attitude to a project which you are nevertheless happy to run off with in a fork. It's not as though the Twisted developers (of which I am not one) are trying to hide their IRC conversation, is it? In this day and age it's nice to see some people playing around, even swearing (oh the shock, the horror, the scandal), and nice to see them even unashamedly include it in their distribution. The most fruitful part of this thread, and what I think really makes it worth otherwise-productive developers spending their time replying, is that it's nice to see the reaction to Andrea's postings. As someone considering using Twisted, I find it interesting and encouraging to read this thread - it gives me increased confidence in Twisted, the people behind it, and the project in general. So while the thread is a waste for some, there is real value for others. My impression is the following: Andrea, having not followed project guidelines and rules because he doesn't have the time, having not been treated like a coding God for whom others will naturally rush to do the mundane tasks in order to receive his patches, and being unwilling to go the extra few yards to get his patches (eventually) incorporated, is now using his formerly precious time to go out of his way to undermine the project. Terry
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On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 03:15:40AM +0200, Terry Jones wrote:
But, apparently, Twisted isn't that bad after all. It still seems like it's worth using. In fact, it's SO good why not FORK THE CODE just so we can quickly apply a few patches and keep using it?
I've dozen thousand lines written in twisted. Moving away from it would require a large rewrite. Maintaining my fixes locally for now is a lower effort than rewriting the whole thing.
deliberately destructive attitude to a project which you are nevertheless happy to run off with in a fork. It's not as though the Twisted developers
Happy to run it isn't really accurate. Simpler to keep running it even if unreliable against malicious clients is more accurate.
My impression is the following: Andrea, having not followed project guidelines and rules because he doesn't have the time, having not been treated like a coding God for whom others will naturally rush to do the mundane tasks in order to receive his patches, and being unwilling to go the extra few yards to get his patches (eventually) incorporated, is now using his formerly precious time to go out of his way to undermine the project.
My impression is that most of my fixes I did over the last years were getting merged for some time. As far as I can tell things derailed when I didn't like the fact that epsilon was becoming a dependency for nevow. I was nevow user at the time. You think it's good that next time there is a twisted bug you've to upgrade epsilon instead of upgrading twisted in the first place? Upgrading twisted would fix the bug for _all_ apps and not only the apps shipped by divmod. When I noticed a combination of weirdness (to mention one more, the new axiom api that cannot work with real DBMS in the async way because it doesn't return deferreds) I tried to find a way out of nevow (also motivated by the fact formless was declared obsolete and so I had to rewrite part of the code anyway) to avoid depending on divmod decisions on the future of nevow. Thankfully web2 was already usable (even if quite buggy) and I found tons of advantages by moving to cheetah and the result was between 2 to 10 times faster depending on the webpage. The code was reduced as well. I should have done that change regardless of epsilon and formless infact. But unfortunately there is a post that explicitly says that twisted-web is not a mailing list to discuss cheetah integrations: http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-web/2006-January/002371.html So then I fail to see why twisted-web mailing list is on twistedmatrix domain if only divmod projects like nevow should be discussed. Can you provide a reasonable answer? I never asked cause I think I already knew the answer. While I acknowledge I wasn't the best bugfix submitter (and obviously I'm no coding God either), I'm definitely not trying to undermine twisted, quite the opposite I'd like twisted to evolve and integrated with not-invented-here technologies, but I fail to see how it can evolve and integrate with cheetah or/and django in this environment. Note that Guido himself did an evaluation of the templating engines an last time I read his blogs, he said he liked django most after comparing it with Cheetah. So I don't think I deserve to be considered as an heretic if I want to integration with other template engines (for example cheetah would get an huge gain by learning to talk with deferreds, I assume for django is similar). Cheetah for example could handle deferreds transparently at zero runtime cost thanks to its compilation stage (dunno about django). It would be great to talk about these things if only we were allowed. I created the cpushare-twisted list as a place to talk about those things that seems not appropriate to talk about here. So long, but I hope this clarifies my impressions.
participants (2)
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Andrea Arcangeli
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Terry Jones