On Dec 12, 2007 11:29 PM, Max Ischenko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hello, > > I wanted to share my concerns regarding using Paste code in Pylons. I > want to apologize in advance; I do not want to sound harsh or > anything, just to discuss a topic which seems important to me. I also > cannot talk on behalf on Pylons devteam, I'm just one of the users. > > I think there is a problem with Paste. > > It's kind of a "closed source" open source package. It is a brainchild > of a single person and seems to remain under full ownership of him, > with very little external contributions. Documentation sucks, which is > to be expected -- since no one else contributing and Ian knows his > code perfectly. Releases are also infrequent which is also > understandable. > > You ask who cares? > > Of course, as an author Ian could do whatever he wants to with his own > project, including doing nothing. I wouldn't raised this topic if > Paste wasn't so important to Pylons success. Basically, large part of > what seems a core part of Pylons comes from a thirdparty we have > little control over. And this sucks in a big way, IMO. > > What can be done? > > It depends on Ian's opinion on the subject, obviously. I would wait > for his reply before posting my own thoughts.
Well, the real issue for Pylons is, "What deficiencies in Paste are holding Pylons back?" I can't think of any, though maybe you can point out some I'm not noticing. The Pylons team is considering a 'pylons' command to decouple Pylons from paster. Not to make gratuitous incompatibilties, but simply so we *can* make it behave differently or take different options if we want to. For instance, the default app template should be Pylons, and something other than --template to choose another (because of its ambiguity with template engines). So far there haven't been enough potential differences to justify changing the command. Ian's documentation tends from "good" to "mediocre" though I've never seen it "bad". But Paste's documentation has improved immensely, and his new project WebOb has excellent docs, and even an API comparision between it and several other frameworks. (http://pythonpaste.org/webob) I'd say virtualenv is the worst documented, but the Pylons community is writing its own virtualenv documentation to take care of that. Ian's other problem is he thinks entry points are easy even though they baffle everybody else. It's hard to keep track of the dozens of entry points in his programs, or figure out what "blah-factory" means or which entry point you might want to set. Paste is certainly not "community developed". Is that a problem? I haven't thought so. I've known Ian for eight years or so, so I guess that biases me, but I have seen him through Paste's entire existence. Initially we were fellow Webware users, frustrated with the incompatibilities between Python web frameworks. WSGI was a light at the end of the tunnel, and Paste is the only framework that fully realizes WSGI and Python's modularity potential throughout its entire core. Ian had the intelligence to build practical tools based on this vision. Nobody else has even attempted to. (Retrofitting existing frameworks does not count; you want something clean from the ground up.) I think Paste needed one man's vision to become a coherent whole. Also, Ian may not be Pylons' inventor but he played a central role in making it exist, and making changes in Paste needed for Pylons. Because Pylons was the first megaframework built on top of Paste, and he wanted to see that be available. Even now there's a lot of collaboration between Pylons and Ian's tools. The only reason it's not more visible is most of the relationship between Pylons and his tools have been set so they don't need daily attention. As for infrequent releases, does it have serious bugs that necessitate new releases? Ian wrote right on the home page, "Paste is an actively maintained project. As of 1.0 (and actually before) we'll make a strong effort to maintain backward compatibility.... There's really no advantage to putting new development or major rewrites in Paste, as opposed to putting them in new packages. Because of this it is planned that major new development will happen outside of Paste. This makes Paste a very stable and conservative piece of infrastructure for building on. This is the intention." So Paste won't change much. If there's anything about Paste we don't like, we can bypass it. Which brings me back to my first question, what don't we like about Paste? What should Paste be doing that it isn't? And can we get that another way than Paste? -- Mike Orr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-devel" 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/pylons-devel?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
