Apologies for bringing this up past the 1.1 feature deadline, but since this isn't a feature perhaps it'll be OK :)
Currently, Django bundles a copy of simplejson[1], at django.utils.simplejson. We use this solely in the serialization system to support dumping to and loading from JSON fixtures. This presents several problems: 1. Because we exclusively look for Django's copy of simplejson, we naturally cannot take advantage of bugfixes or performance improvements in simplejson unless/until we integrate them into the bundled copy. 2. This in turn creates a maintenance headache and a source of potential bugs (e.g., one found recently by someone using NetBeans to report unresolved symbols[2]). 3. We constantly get into debates about when and how often to update our bundled copy of simplejson. 4. We occasionally get into debates over whether Django ought to first search for a system-installed copy of simplejson or for the "json" module (simplejson under a new name) which exists in the Python standard library as of Python 2.6[3]. It is occasionally stated that Django tries, as much as possible, to avoid having many dependencies out of the box and, if this is true, then bundling simplejson may make sense despite the above problems, as it means there's one less piece of software people need to install to use Django. But this argument doens't really hold water, because we already require people to install: * A database adapter (unless on Python 2.5+ and using SQLite). * PIL, to use ImageField. * The Python memcached bindings to use memcached. * Perversely, Jing to use XMLField. * flup to use FastCGI/SCGI/AJP. * A whole pile of stuff to use django.contrib.gis. * And, most damning for th case of something that's only bundled to support serialization, PyYAML for YAML serialization. I'm sure there are more dependencies lurking out there, actually, depending on which bits of Django people want to use, but hopefully the point is made: any argument based on "Django doesn't have dependencies" falls flat, because Django's always had various dependencies for the core framework and various others for additional functionality. Given this, the fact that it's trivially easy to install simplejson (and it's bundled with Python these days) and the fact that it creates a number of problems, I'd like to propose that we begin the process of deprecating and removing django.utils.simplejson in favor of system-installed simplejson or Python 2.6 json. Since eventually we'll have to get to Python 2.6/3.0 anyway (see my earlier Stephensonian post regarding *that* migration process) and when we do there'll be literally no point to bundling our own copy, we can even view this simply as getting a head start on the process. The only remaining argument I can see against unbundling simplejson is that it would break backwards compatibility in the 1.x release series. While this is undoubtedly a pedantic answer, the API stability document[4] is quite clear about which parts of Django constitute stable, supported APIs, and django.utils.simplejson is not one of those parts (in fact, most of django.utils is not). This leaves only the question of how, precisely, we'll get simplejson out of Django. One possibility would be to deprecate and remove over a period of releases, and this would be consistent with, e.g., how Python typically handles this problem. Such a process might look like this: * Django 1.1: JSON serialization looks for system json/simplejson first, fall back to django.utils.simplejson if not found and warn with PendingDeprecationWarning whenever django.utils.simplejson is used. * Django 1.2: Continue looking for system json/simplejson and falling back, but the PendingDeprecationWarning becomes a DeprecationWarning. * Django 1.3: django.utils.simplejson is removed, and attempting to use it simply gets you an ImportError. Use of JSON serialization will require separate installation of simplejson, or Python 2.6 with the json module. In the meantime, django.utils.simplejson should basically cease being maintained apart from bugs which interfere with the use of JSON serialization; in other words, new versions of simplejson should not be integrated into Django, and users should be advised that if they want to use a newer version they should simply install it (since Django will start using system json/simplejson when available). So... thoughts? [1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson [2] http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/netbeans_screenshot_of_the_week1 [3] http://docs.python.org/dev/library/json.html [4] http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/misc/api-stability/#misc-api-stability -- "Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct." --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. 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