[Web-SIG] PEP 444 != WSGI 2.0

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 5:02 PM, Graham Dumpleton
<graham.dumpleton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can we please clear up a matter.
>
> GothAlice (don't know off hand there real name), keeps going around
> and claiming:
>
> """
> After some discussion on the Web-SIG mailing list, PEP 444 is now
> "officially" WSGI 2, and PEP 3333 is WSGI 1.1
> """
[...]

>From past posts here, that's Alice Bevan–McGregor
<alice at gothcandy.com>, added to the thread.

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 8:34 PM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> Until the PEP is approved, it's just a suggestion.  So for it to "really" be
> WSGI 2 it will have to go through at least some approval process; which is
> kind of ad hoc, but not so ad hoc as just to implicitly happen.  For WSGI 2
> to happen, someone has to write something up and propose it.  Alice has
> agreed to do that, working from PEP 444 which several other people have
> participated in.  Calling it "WSGI 2" instead of "Web 3" was brought up on
> this list, and the general consensus seemed to be that it made sense -- some
> people felt a little funny about it, but ultimately it seemed to be
> something everyone was okay with (with some people like myself feeling
> strongly it should be "WSGI 2").
>
> I'm not sure why you are so stressed out about this?  If you think it's
> really an issue, perhaps 2 could be replaced with "2alpha" until such time
> as it is approved?

I'm guessing that Graham is concerned that Alice's assertion implies
that the PEP is approved. IOW that the *future* WSGI 2.0 is equal to
the *current* PEP 444. While we don't know for sure, this is likely
wrong (at least in some details).

OTOH I agree with Ian that it seems correct to say that PEP 444 (which
is still under development) is striving to arrive at a consensus for
what will be named WSGI 2.0. This is not unusual in the world of
standards -- future standards usually are given names and document IDs
long before there is agreement on the contents of the standard. In
this sense Alice's use of "officially" is not incorrect, although out
of context it could be misunderstood to imply PEP approval. I would
recommend adding caution about this whenever the equivalency between
PEP 444 and WSGI 2.0 is mentioned -- perhaps it is enough to state
that "PEP 444 is the draft for WSGI 2.0".

Often people or companies draw premature conclusions from draft
standards and prepare implementations that comply with the draft
standard in the hope that the draft won't change before it is set in
stone, and sometimes such implementations are incorrectly billed as
compliant with the standard (rather than with a specific version of
the draft). I don't know if that is what Alice is doing -- an equally
likely theory is that she's just excited.

I haven't followed the development of PEP 4444 much, so I can't
comment on how much agreement there is on the draft; Ian's use of
"alpha" suggests that there's some way to go still.

One clearly factual error in Alice's (quoted) post: PEP 3333 is WSGI
1.0.1, not WSGI 1.1. AFAIK there's no such thing as WSGI 1.1 now.

Alice, since you have in the past posted here suggesting you are
interested in carrying PEP 444 / WSGI 2.0 forward, please acknowledge
that you understand the concerns raised in this thread.

Graham, I suggest that you don't worry about this issue, and instead
focus on helping the draft turn into a standard by providing feedback
on PEP 444. Unless there's part of the story you're not telling here.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)