On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Jeremy Dunck <[email protected]> wrote:
> I was wondering if people would be opposed to an opinionated tutorial? > For example: you should use virtualenv and pip, south, should handle > requirements this way, should prefer factories over fixtures, should > have this project directory layout, etc. > > I could go either way - my preferred approach isn't right in all > cases, and it might seem a distraction to the absolute beginner or a > person who has their own opinions. I think we should shy away from teaching "best practices" when they are external to Django. Pointing people at other useful projects in an aside may be useful, but making pip, virtualenv and south part of the mainline tutorial is a bad idea for two reasons: (1) For people who are already versed in python and/or web development best practices, it takes away from what they want to learn: the core features of Django that differentiate it from other frameworks. (2) For people who are brand new to programming and/or python, it blurs boundaries and confuses them about what is really important. A new programmer has no way to distinguish between "manage.py startproject tutorial" and "pip install south". One is a core feature of Django development, the other is a third-party Python tool to download a third-party dependency. People can and do write blog posts all the time that go something like, "How to install Django on Ubuntu 12.04" that give a series of six commands to paste into a console. There's always the danger that they are incorrect or misguided, but on the whole they are more likely to be relevant for setting up a sane Django environment on some specific operating system than we can be in a general tutorial. They are also dated and appropriately transient: a blog post from 2008 can be forgiven for missing some latest best practices, whereas a tutorial enshrined in Django's official documentation cannot. Best, Alex Ogier -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
