On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 8:32 PM, Mat Clayton<m...@wakari.co.uk> wrote: > Hey all, > > For us of the most useful developments in the django community recently has > been the django debug toolbar. > > http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar/tree/master/debug_toolbar > > This seems to be branching and growing very rapidly on github, however lots > of branches are appearing and it is getting harder to track which ones > contain the best or most complete featureset, Wouldn't it take some sense to > combine these into a single toolbar and incorporate it into a contrib > package? In development I would argue that most users require very similar > features and could benefit from a unified toolbar, and that the use cases > are common enough to justify a contrib package. If the original authors are > happy for it to be combined? I may have time to help out with this, but time > is quickly being absorbed by other projects, but thought now was probably > the right time to bounce the suggestion about.
In principle, I'm all in favour of this idea. DDT would seem to me to be a natural fit for our informal defintion of contrib - an optional, defacto standard of a common pattern. The optional, common pattern part is, IMHO, a no-brainer. The only issue is the extent to which DDT is a defacto standard. I completely agree that there would be value in having a common framework for debugging tools of this nature. However, the presence of a deeply fragmented community indicates that a defacto standard has not yet emerged. Of the top of my head, I can think of at least four things that would stand in the way of DDT getting added to django.contrib: Firstly, there is the simple issue of ownership and copyright. Obviously, those that have written DDT components that are to be included need to be onboard with this idea. Secondly, plugins. As I understand it, DDT is half framework, and half a collection of debugging plugins, and one of the sources of forking is people writing their own plugins. I haven't dug into this in detail, but in order for DDT to get to trunk, we would need to be able to ship an interface that is conceptually similar to db.backends - that is, we will advertise a stable interface, and ship a small number of obvious plugins. The community would then be in a position to contribute extra plugins - some of which might one day get added to django.contrib. If there is any disagreement in the interface that a plugin is expected to implement, this would be a serious impediment to inclusion in django.contrib. Thirdly - look & feel. I haven't used DDT for a while, so I don't know what the state of the art is here. Last time I used DDT, it worked fine, but I felt that it needed a little UI polish, especially in providing a way to hide it or preventing the toolbar from obscuring meaningful parts of the underlying site. I don't know how time and forking has treated this particular aspect of DDT. Lastly - time. This needs to be done in a timely fashion. If we're going to include DDT in Django v1.2, then we're going to need to have a consensus position - if not a ready-to-commit patch, then at least agreement on what would be in a ready-to-commit patch - in a little over a month. It it takes much longer than that to reconcile the forks, then we may need to consider this a work-in-progress for v1.3. So - if you (or anyone else) is interested in advocating the addition of DDT to django.contrib, you're going to need to make sense of the mess for the core team. The first step in this process is wrangling the forked community into a single repository that is a candidate for inclusion. 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 django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
