On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Rodrigo Bernardo Pimentel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Martin mentioned that he would be willing to co-mentor me for GSoC along > with a Django developer, with either one being the "official" mentor. > > So I'd like to know what you think about this as a GSoC project, and if > someone would be willing to mentor (or co-mentor) me on it.
Although I'm not mentoring this year (the period when the most work needs to be done on the mentor side is, coincidentally, the period when I'll be tearing my hair out trying to finish writing a book), and though I'm not saying that you shouldn't apply for SoC, I'd like to say that I'd approach this with extreme reservations. Here's why: Porting Django to Python 3.0 at this point is likely to be a rather complex task; it'll require a solid working knowledge of both Django's internals and Python 3.0, and a familiarity with the codebases that can only come from an extensive commitment to knowing and understanding both. So I'm a bit worried that anyone would try it without the requisite background in how Django currently works or a history of contributing code to the project. Add to that the fact that "Django", just Django, doesn't exist in a vacuum: at a bare minimum it needs database adapters and a web server interface. It's unlikely that any of the non-SQLite database adapters will be ported to Python 3.0 by the time SoC is over, which means that you'd have something that only runs on SQLite. And it's extremely unlikely that there'll be stable web server interfaces to run behind; at this point we're still not quite certain what WSGI on Python 3.0 is going to look like, and though Graham is a god among mere mortals I doubt very much that there'll be a mod_wsgi or a mod_python ready for general use in time to handle this. And on top of that, the big draw of Python and, by extension, Django, is and always will be the rich ecosystem of third-party code to draw on in writing applications. If I need to deal with feeds I go grab the feedparser. If I need to scrape HTML I use BeautifulSoup. If I need to talk to a web service I use a Python wrapper around its API. There's a vast amount of software out there that's necessary to make any Python web framework truly useful, and it's going to be a good long while before enough of it is on 3.0 to really offer anything to application writers. So even if this project wraps up with a spot-on perfect port of the Django codebase, it would still be developing something that only runs on (at most) one database, probably can't actually sit behind a web server, and which doesn't have any useful third-party code to draw upon. To me, the key to a successful SoC proposal is something that, at the end of the summer there's something people can immediately pick up and get use out of, something that's already adding value to Django for end users. And unfortunately, porting to Python 3.0 -- while a cool thing to do -- isn't likely to be of much practical use any time this decade. So if I were mentoring (and, hence, judging applications as they come in), I'd probably give this an immediate -1 in favor of something which will add practical value to Django by the end of the summer. Python 3.0's cool, don't get me wrong, but porting Django to it is going to be a long and tricky process unfit for the SoC timeline, and it's probably going to be two or three years before it's anywhere near as useful as Django already is on Python 2.x. -- "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. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
