On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 4:21 PM, James Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 12:45 AM, Russell Keith-Magee > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I guess the thing that's bugging me is that this mostly seems to come > down to historical inertia; we already have simplejson in Django, and > so the perception is that we should continue to bundle it. I think > eventually we're going to have to get rid of it since sooner or later > we'll be targeting only Python versions which have a json module built > in, so we might as well start dealing with it.
Granted - the Python 3 migration plan will eventually force the issue. I just don't see any urgency to address it before then. If we link the two schedules, we can end up in a situation where SimpleJSON is guaranteed to be available while deprecating our own maintained version. >> On the other hand: at present, the only prerequisite for running the >> system test suite is a database backend, and not even that if you're >> running Python 2.5 and SQLite. If we stopped packaging SimpleJSON with >> Django, a great chunk of the system test suite would no longer work >> out of the box. On top of that, no matter obvious we make the error >> message, we're going to get "Why doesn't my fixture load" questions on >> Django-users. > > Several large and popular third-party Django apps already make use of > non-JSON fixture formats; for example, Satchmo cannot load its > fixtures or run its unit tests without PyYAML (and in my experience, > YAML is preferred over JSON as a fixture format when it can be used), > and yet they don't seem to be crushed under the weight of "I can't > load the fixtures" problems. Django community != Satchmo community. I would be very surprised if the Python competence of the average Satchmo newbie wasn't significantly higher than that of the average Django newbie. By the time a new developer has worked out what Satchmo is, and how it fits into Django, one would hope that they have also worked out that this is all just Python code, and the error messages really are telling you what is wrong. > Similarly, ImageField has always required PIL (which is much trickier > to install), and yet we don't see corresponding large numbers of > questions on this list from people who can't manage to get it working. Firstly, there aren't that many tests that depend on PIL. By contrast, every test with a fixture depends on SimpleJSON. Secondly, in most (all?) of the tests where PIL is required, the test downgrades the ImageField to a FileField if PIL isn't available. This does lead to slightly less complete test coverage, but not failed tests. A similar downgrade would not be possible if SimpleJSON were absent without providing fixtures in alternate formats or disabling half the test suite. > So I have a hard time believing that this would pose such a large > hurdle to use of Django. I wouldn't have thought an error message that reads "Error: Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined" would lead to so many questions on the mailing list, and yet.... >> IMHO, the suggestions hovering around #9266 and the related mailing >> list threads - that users should be able to override the bundled >> version of SimpleJSON - have merit, and it looks like Malcolm has a >> handle on how to make this approach happen. However, completely >> removing SimpleJSON seems like asking for a world of pain, with no >> real gain. > > To me, the gain is no longer bundling and maintaining something that > we don't *have* to bundle and maintain. Advertising simplejson (or > Python 2.6+) as a dependency for using JSON serialization doesn't, to > me, seem to be too onerous a thing to do, and it gets something out of > Django (where, arguably, it didn't belong in the first place) and out > of our hair. My point (and Malcolm's) is that while this is true, the burden of maintaining SimpleJSON simply isn't that high. In all honesty, I've probably spent more effort writing emails on this thread that I have dealing with SimpleJSON issues in the last 3 years. On the other hand, I have spent a lot of time answering newbie questions by pointing them at obvious error messages. Yours, Russ Magee %-) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
