[Web-SIG] PEP 444 != WSGI 2.0

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 2011-01-02 at 09:21 -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Graham, I hope that you can stop being grumpy about the process that
> > is being followed and start using your passion to write up a critique
> > of the technical merits of Alice's draft. You don't have to attack the
> > whole draft at once -- you can start by picking one or two important
> > issues and try to guide a discussion here on web-sig to tease out the
> > best solutions.  Please  understand that given the many different ways
> > people use and implement WSGI there may be no perfect solution within
> > reach -- writing a successful standard is the art of the compromise.
> > (If you still think the process going forward should be different,
> > please write me off-list with your concerns.)
> >
> > Everyone else on this list, please make a new year's resolution to
> > help the WSGI 2.0 standard become a reality in 2011.
>
> I think Graham mostly has an issue with this thing being called "WSGI
> 2".
>
> FTR, avoiding naming arguments is why I titled the original PEP "Web3".
> I knew that if I didn't (even though personally I couldn't care less if
> it was called Buick or McNugget), people would expend effort arguing
> about the name rather than concentrate on the process of creating a new
> standard.  They did anyway of course; many people argued publically
> wishing to rename Web3 to WSGI2.  On balance, though, I think giving the
> standard a "neutral" name before it's widely accepted as a WSGI
> successor was (and still is) a good idea, if only as a conflict
> avoidance strategy. ;-)
>

Well, it seems too late for that now. :-)

Note that a new standard, even with a familiar name, doesn't automatically
get wide adoption. This wouldn't be the first time that a new version of a
popular standard is put forward by some well-meaning folks, which is
subsequently ignored by most users. (IIRC this happened to several versions
of IMAP, there's been an "improvement" of HTTP that nobody uses, and HTML 5
seems to be saying that XHTML was a mistake.

So, let's discuss the merits.


> That said, I have no opinion on the technical merits of the new PEP 444
> draft; I've resigned myself to using derivatives of PEP 3333 "forever".
> It's good enough.  Most of the really interesting stuff seems to happen
> at higher levels anyway, and the benefit of a new standard doesn't
> outweigh the angst caused by trying to reach another compromise.  I'd
> suggest we just embrace it, adding minor tweaks as necessary, until we
> reach some sort of technical impasse it doesn't address.
>

Actually that does sound like an opinion on the technical merits. I can't
tell though, because I'm not familiar enough with PEP 444 to know what the
critical differences are compared to PEP 3333. Could someone summarize?

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