Re: [Twisted-Python] Twisted Project Jobs Volunteer
On 11/09/2011 07:49 AM, Tim Allen wrote: On Wed, Nov 09, 2011 at 12:50:23AM -0800, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote: On Nov 8, 2011, at 7:39 PM, Tim Allen wrote: As far as I know (having written most of the documentation in the linked wiki page, and from a brief skim through the git-svn manpage) it's impossible to make a shallow clone with git-svn (something like an ordinary svn checkout, or git clone --depth N), so anyone who wants to contribute to Twisted via git needs to clone the repository from scratch (potentially overloading the SVN server, although nobody seemed to notice or complain when I was doing my git-svn clone), or just copy a tarball of somebody's comprehensive, elaborate, automatic mirroring setup. This is the part I don't understand. Why doesn't 'git clone' work right in the face of svn metadata? Git has a .git directory in each repository, and expects certain files to be present within it. If there's more stuff that it doesn't know about, it just ignores it. git-svn keeps its metadata in other files that git-clone doesn't know or care about, and hence they don't get cloned. I guess there's an argument for not cloning them - just because person X has particular access rights to an SVN server doesn't mean that person Y should have them just because they cloned a repository from X. bzr-svn has some metadata it caches about the svn repository which doesn't stick around in the bzr repo or branch, but (from the performance of using it, at least) it doesn't need to stop the world and grab all of that data for most operations. In a git-svn-cloned repository, ordinary git operations are as speedy as you'd expect. git svn fetch is slow because (I think) it has to separately request each changed file from each SVN revision, and I think there's some other operations that are slow because they involve talking to the SVN server (like 'tell me what SVN properties are attached to this file'). It would be better (for most users) to point to a canonical way to get access to a git-svn clone than to document how to make one, if making one takes 24 hours :). Don't worry, it doesn't take 24 hours! It's *much* longer than that! ;) (as the wiki page states, in early 2010 and from the other side of the world it took about a week; I don't have a feel for how it changes over time) It's worth noting that you aren't *required* to clone all eight trillion Twisted revisions in order to get a working clone. Doing `git svn clone -rN:HEAD url` where `N` is some revision number will only clone from that revision. Obviously you will not have the entire history of the repository at this point, but I highly doubt that would be a meaningful loss for the majority of use cases. I mean, yeah, it'd be nice to have a full git clone, but if you just prefer to use git for development and want to submit patches to Twisted it's hardly an insurmountable task compared to the other requirements for successfully working a ticket to completion. I'm not sure why that would be, except that possibly they found a tarball of somebody else's git-svn clone and forgot to update it, or they're confused about the best way to get cloned from some unofficial, no-longer updated mirror. Fixing this probably depends on having the canonical, correct, convenient instructions and advertising them widely. You edited GitMirror before, you can do it again :). I'm editing it to include what we've discussed here, as well as a few other things that I researched this afternoon and put into a reply that my MUA ate before it was sent. I believe the next step should be that somebody with the required permissions should connect to a machine on the same physical network as the SVN server and run: time git svn clone --stdlayout --prefix=svn/ \ svn+ssh://svn.twistedmatrix.com/svn/Twisted ...then check the load on the SVN server and see if it's going to be an issue to let the clone complete. If the clone completes successfully, then (a) we know about how long it takes, and (b) we have a seed repository we can potentially put up for people to download. I'd be happy to download it, check it, and write up some documentation about how people should update it. If it doesn't complete successfully, we should have some helpful error messages, adjust the clone command line and try again. ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Website visual improvements
On Nov 6, 2011, at 12:51 PM, Jonathan Jacobs jonathan+twis...@jsphere.com wrote: Hello, I recently volunteered to make some visual improvements to the Twisted Trac website. I received a lot of good feedback and suggestions from the IRC channel, most of which I took to heart and fine-tuned the changes. I think everyone is generally happy with the changes, I'm happy with the changes and I'd like help with moving things forward to eventually deploy these changes. The branch is currently up for review on Launchpad[1], the merge proposal contains links to some[2] static[3] pages demonstrating the style changes. (It is worth noting that there are some quirks that are as a result of File - Save As in Firefox, I wouldn't worry about these.) I am willing to help with the final deployment of the site changes as well as integrating the new styling with: * the Sphinx documentation and documentation tools; * the Lore documentation (which I see thijs recently did some work on) if that is necessary; * and the pydoctor API documentation. Wow Jonathan, these changes look great! -- Jonathan [1] https://code.launchpad.net/~jjacobs/twisted-website/visual-design-update/+merge/80468 [2] https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4030134/Twisted/Twisted.htm [3] https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4030134/Twisted/5047.htm ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] SURVEY: Have you submitted a patch to Twisted and it never got in?
On Jul 1, 2011, at 1:41 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On Jul 1, 2011, at 1:08 PM, chris wrote: doing continuous development based on tools like svn and trac is really painful and it's really difficult to motivate yourself to work on a once rejected ticket Can you be more specific, please? What's painful? I always found it especially irritating to come back to a patch later. If I don't already have a patched checkout of Twisted, I need to figure out what revision I was at before (or to actually be safe, make a HEAD checkout), then reapply my patch, hoping it is still valid. With a fork I can check it out any time, rebase to the current master (or branch I'm working on), having my changes reapplied for me. When I have made more changes I just push it up. No changes to tickets or switching keywords or watching Trac reject my patch file 10 times then clearing all my cookies or whatever. I've always admired Twisted's standards and process; I think they have made it possible for such a huge project to maintain working order for so long. The tools could use an upgrade, though. Procedurally, it's almost the same number of clicks (except for the unfortunate need to type the word 'review') to do this on Github or Launchpad. What part of the process is painful? If you're not a committer, we're not going to let you run code on our buildbots either way without a cursory review (that's just a recipe for automated attacks) so it's not like you get past that step for free, either. Plus, you can use the DVCS of your choice to actually author the patch. ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Information on new endpoints API?
On Jun 13, 2011, at 8:26 AM, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On 12 Jun, 01:34 pm, ores...@orestis.gr wrote: This is really why we introduced endpoints - to make it possible for applications to listen on (or connect to) an address that is specified elsewhere. Previously, the easy thing to do was to only support TCP/IPv4. With endpoints, the easy thing to do is to work with any address family/transport type that there is now (or will be in the future!) an endpoint for. That's a perfect explanation, many thanks! I will be giving a training on Twisted in a few days during the EuroPython conference (actually, more of an assisted tutorial than a training) and I'm not sure how I should present this. Any information would be helpful. Orestis Hope this helps! Good luck with the session. :) Thanks. BTW, I've spent the past week browsing through twisted's documentation (esp. the API reference). I have a few ideas that I think would help newcomers find their away around much easier (and be less scared of twisteD). The ideas are mostly organisational, the material is there, if one knows what to look for. Should I create new tickets or mail ideas to this list? It would probably be best if you could get Kevin Horn and/or Tom Davis' attention. They've both been thinking about making the documentation more accessible lately. It would be great to incorporate your ideas into the overall plan. My ears, they burn! But, yeah, in terms of discoverability, the ever-near lore-to-Sphinx conversion does a ton for discoverability and makes obvious a number of opportunities for organizational improvement (a link to a recentish build eludes me, but when you seem them you'll know what I mean). Beyond the low-hanging fruit, there are many notes regarding individual docs improvements. Feel free to share your own, though I recommend checking Trac first because many documents do indeed have tickets. If you need help there let me know. Speaking of the lore-to-Sphinx conversion, I am contractually obligated to inform you that improvements to current documentation is not blocked by the pending conversion. And that you have the right to a lawyer. Cheers, Tom Jean-Paul ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] prerelease preview predocumentation
On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Mar 23, 2011, at 9:34 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote: http://twistedmatrix.com/~glyph/sphinx-preview-11.0pre1/ Anyone have comments about this? With all the recent excitement about the docs, I thought there would be a much more active thread here! Thoughts about whether we should link it from the front page? I meant to get to this sooner, but my weekend was unexpectedly busy. The docs look awesome! Aside from the common formatting error of mandatory space after marked up text, I didn't run into anything really odd. One issue on the index is that both Twisted Conch and Twisted Core have subsections called Twisted Documentation. It's great to have everything indexed on one page with easy drill-down into specific sections. It becomes really obvious where the hierarchy can be optimized and how we can logically go about breaking up the various sections. In reply to your original post, I'm still planning to finish the trial tutorial. I feel like an ass for not doing it this weekend, but I turned out to be rather occupied. I'm going to make time for it early this week if it kills me. -glyph ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Announcing Twisted 11.0.0pre1!
On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 8:17 PM, Jessica McKellar jessica.mckel...@gmail.com wrote: Intrepid Twisted developers and users: from Cambridge, Massachusetts I am pleased to announce the arrival of Twisted 11.0.0 pre-release 1. Tarballs for the pre-release are available at: http://twistedmatrix.com/~jesstess/11.0.0pre1/ Highlights include: * a new templating system in Twisted Web, twisted.web.template, derived from Divmod Nevow. * improved behavior of subprocess spawning on FreeBSD. * an API for constructing endpoints from descriptive strings. * twisted.plugin no longer emits a confusing traceback when it can't write a cache file. For more information, see the NEWS file. Download the tarballs and test away! Awesome! Thanks for doing the release, Jessica! :) Thanks, Jessica ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] PyCon 2011 Twisted Sprint
On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 1:18 AM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Mar 3, 2011, at 12:21 AM, Tom Davis wrote: On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:45 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Mar 2, 2011, at 11:28 PM, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On 8 Feb, 04:24 pm, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: Hello all, Once again, we will be sprinting at PyCon. I've just added Twisted to http://us.pycon.org/2011/sprints/projects/. If you plan to attend (for any amount of time), please add your name to the attendees list. Also feel free to suggest additional sprint topics. We won't really limit sprint topics to things planned in advance, but adding particular things to the list is a probably a good way to attract more sprinters and let people do any background research that might be necessary before the sprint actually starts. Just a reminder about this. Please sign up if you plan to come! All levels of experience are welcome, so if you've never been to a sprint before, we'd love to see you. Sign up as soon as you can though. Sometimes space is allocated based on these lists. I'm not sure how it's going to work this year, but it's best if we know approximately how many people will be there so we can be sure to get a big enough room for everyone. Finally signed up; last time the You must login to edit message was hardcoded *and* there was no link to the edit page. That was a confusing journey. Woah, awesome! So you're going to be in Atlanta after all? (Or am I mixing you up with someone else whose plans were uncertain?) That was me, I'm just bad with status updates. Really excited for my first PyCon and some concentrated Twisted hacking! ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] PyCon 2011 Twisted Sprint
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 11:45 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Mar 2, 2011, at 11:28 PM, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On 8 Feb, 04:24 pm, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: Hello all, Once again, we will be sprinting at PyCon. I've just added Twisted to http://us.pycon.org/2011/sprints/projects/. If you plan to attend (for any amount of time), please add your name to the attendees list. Also feel free to suggest additional sprint topics. We won't really limit sprint topics to things planned in advance, but adding particular things to the list is a probably a good way to attract more sprinters and let people do any background research that might be necessary before the sprint actually starts. Just a reminder about this. Please sign up if you plan to come! All levels of experience are welcome, so if you've never been to a sprint before, we'd love to see you. Sign up as soon as you can though. Sometimes space is allocated based on these lists. I'm not sure how it's going to work this year, but it's best if we know approximately how many people will be there so we can be sure to get a big enough room for everyone. Finally signed up; last time the You must login to edit message was hardcoded *and* there was no link to the edit page. That was a confusing journey. -glyph ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] twisted can't find internet module
On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Feb 10, 2011, at 8:08 AM, Stephen Thorne wrote: I am also very curious about the nature of the problem horse, as google translate suggests the first response is about. :-) I did not use google translate, but I was wondering why horses were mentioned in the discussion as well. Since the poster hasn't clarified, I thought I'd share this fascinating tidbit: My wife (who was excited to learn the phrase for bug report from this message) explains that horse-top or on a horse is a Chinese idiom meaning fast, so the responder was telling the OP to describe their problem better, and if they do so, it will be resolved quickly. I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed; I thought that maybe Problem Horse would be Twisted's answer to the Django Pony, but alas we will never get to meet it. I must admit that despite the ban on laughing out loud in #twisted, I have done so in my apartment multiple times over Problem Horse. I hope its fate is not yet sealed! ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Task-based documentation started
On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Feb 1, 2011, at 10:53 AM, Tom Davis wrote: On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Jan 31, 2011, at 11:41 AM, Tom Davis wrote: Thoughts? Priority #1 for most people who are enthusiastic about documentation is to come in and write a ton of additional documentation. But this is a lot like trying to fix a large, broken, untested system by writing a pile of new, untested code, because this time we'll get the design right. What were the problems with the way the previous documentation got written? How did we end up with this mess, and what is going to be done differently this time? Most importantly, *what is the metric by which we will judge this new documentation to be better?* I'm still really interested in concise answer to that last question there. What are the priorities for what you're trying to improve? What you've listed here is the steps you're going to take in order to improve it but I have yet to see a lucid description of the problem in detail. I think the problem is largely one of organization (as it relates to accessibility, e.g. how / under what context do I get linked to such and such thing?) and outdated documentation. I think the individual problems are all very well-known and while there is not some overarching problem with all the documentation that requires starting from scratch, reorganizing and restructuring what's there may make it look like I'm trying to do that. Those tutorials aren't new at all; they were taken (often verbatim) from the using twisted.web document. Writing a ton of new documentation really isn't my goal at all. My goals are threefold: 1. Reorganize existing documentation in a way that makes it more accessible. Accessible to whom? How will reorganizing it make it more accessible? One way to interpret this statement is that your goal is to remove all diagrams, because the documentation is currently not accessible to the blind. I'm pretty sure *that's* not what you mean, but it's a good example of how ambiguous this statement is :). (Plus, the couple of blind developers I've talked to about Twisted didn't seem to have a problem with the docs...) 1. Edit existing documentation to conform to a task (howto/tutorial/etc.) vs. expanded learning model. (the whole instant gratification thing and all that) OK, I'm on board with that. Except that in order to understand the tutorial documentation you need a good backing of reference docs, so it's not like you can just choose one over the other. And we have lots of tutorial docs (c.f. the infamous finger tutorial) which are in the tutorial / task-oriented paradigm but don't teach much that's directly useful. Finger is a really bad example of what a howto should be; it doesn't teach you how to achieve some specific, common goal quickly and easily. The names howto http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/names/howto/names.htmlis a good example of a howto that tells me exactly how to do something in as few steps as humanly possible. It could use a reference to wherever all the functions (SOA, A, NS, etc.) are coming from and links to some follow-up documentation of the *names* project in general, but I digress. 1. Gradually update / replace code listings with current best practices examples that are tested. No arguing with that at all, that sounds great. I know you want an actual *layout* for the reorganization. Not really. What I want is a clear understanding of what you intend to change. I usually get that by reading a diff: it's easy to read a diff and see what changed in the old versus the new version of something. I can tell if it's an improvement without having to digest the entire content. But the structure of http://docs.recursivedream.com/twisted/ is a sprawling mess of placeholders and half-finished ideas. It's different from the existing documentation in lots of ways; it has a completely different stylesheet (which I assume is some standard Sphinx thing we will get rid of with the consistent theming work in Kevin's sphinx transition). I don't know what I'm looking at or how to appreciate it. This is why I started off by complaining about the separate git repository. If you're going to work in a separate repository and a separate format and not produce diffs that I can skim, then it's *very* hard to comment intelligently on your strategy, and you need to take an immense amount of care to call out the sections you consider complete, what exactly you want feedback on, and areas where you have or haven't added new content (so you can't be blamed for issues in old content that you're not trying to update). Note that diffs against Kevin's sphinx output would basically satisfy this same requirement, even if that output isn't really complete and those diffs would need to be re
Re: [Twisted-Python] Boston Mini-Sprint: February Edition
On Feb 6, 2011, at 9:05 PM, Tenth te...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: We'll be holding another Boston-area Twisted Mini-Sprint on Sunday, February 13th at my place in Somerville, MA... I've sent out invitations to the attendees from last time, plus a few other people who've expressed interest, but if you weren't invited yet, and want to be, let me know! I am interested in attending, good sir! Thanks, - Dave ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Task-based documentation started
On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 3:44 AM, Albert Brandl albert.bra...@weiermayer.comwrote: On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 02:41:38PM -0500, Tom Davis wrote: Thoughts? I think that the overview in the first two sections is very good. It made me curious to learn more. The breadcrumbs on the main page look like this: Contents :: Serving on the Web — HTML, CGI, WSGI, etc. » Might be a problem with the Sphinx configuration. Yeah, this is just how the Sphinx template lays things out and it's the default one I use for documentation on my site, merely because the color scheme is similar. It's definitely not the greatest and a Twisted-theme one already exists so we'll be working from that. Not sure about the link read more about Twisted: There _is_ more about Twisted on the rest of the page. When I clicked the link, I expected to be redirected to twistedmatrix.com or something like this. Maybe you don't need a link at this position at all. Well, that was originally going to lead to some history/about stuff, but looking at it again that doesn't seem like an initially great use of time. In the Why Use Twisted section, you write Framework - not sure if this should be uppercased. But there are some other nouns (Tasks, Project Documentation) that are written this way, so maybe it's Your Way Of Emphasizing Things ;-). I'm also not sure if the explanation why I would use Twisted should be in bold letters. Everywhere else you use italics. Do you intend to create a task description for connecting to an SSH server (maybe with certificates)? This is something that whould have been handy for me in the past. Either create or expose one that already exists, yes. The Everything Else section should not contain links that are already presented somewhere else. These are ToC trees which are different from inline links. I don't feel there's much harm in linking to something twice on one page especially when the same words are used and one of the uses is clearly a ToC. Do you intend to add some links to external pages here (e.g. the API documentation or other web pages describing how to use the framework)? Or should this documentation be self-contained? API links will be common and will be under some reference/links area, I'm sure. It is very much a work in progress. One small usability quirk: The presentation of links in an orange, bold font does not have much recognition value. I think it would be better to use the standard way of marking links by using a blue, underlined font. The same goes for links that have already been visited. Again, this is a Sphinx template issue so we'll see how it changes with the actual Twisted one :) Thanks for the feedback! -Tom Best regards, Albert -- Albert Brandl Weiermayer Solutions GmbH | Abteistraße 12, A-4813 Altmünster phone: +43 (0) 720 70 30 14| fax: +43 (0) 7612 20 3 56 web: http://www.weiermayer.com ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Task-based documentation started
On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 6:19 PM, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On 10:39 pm, t...@recursivedream.com wrote: Take http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/10.2.0/web/howto/web-in-60/static- content.html : Tell me the one command I need to serve a directory, *then* show me the code that one command effectively runs and vaguely what it does. I think this is partially a disagreement over what tasks we actually want to document. If the command line interface gets primacy in the documentation, then I think you're writing documentation for end users (sys admins, non-programmers). I don't know about anyone else, but this category of documentation hadn't really crossed my mind before. I think that (ultimately) this is good documentation to have, but I don't know if it's as important as getting the programmer-oriented documentation in better shape. Another point to consider is that twistd web (and most other twistd plugins we provide) are semi-random mish mashes of functionality. They have accreted by contribution from many different people over the years with no governing design or goal aside from expose features from the command line. This does not make them the friendliest tools around. The functionality they are missing is often surprising, particularly when contrasted with some of the (non-)functionality they do provide. I don't want to say that they do not bear documenting until their state is improved, but if we focused on other areas first, maybe we would have something better to document when we eventually get around to things like twistd web. I look at it from a pragmatic point of view: If the task is called serving HTML and you *can* do that with a single command line argument, I'm willing to possibly waste a sentence exposing something unideal or incomplete if it fixes the visitor's problem *right now*. That's simply not a lot of effort for a good deal of gain. Immediately after that command line section should be a dive into the actual code (or at least enough to get serving via a python file). I suppose you may disagree with task-based views entirely. The using twisted.web howto isn't really one at all. It covers many / all of the serving aspects of twisted.web which is cool and necessary, but the actual building block tasks are buried. It's still early and I'm not sure how much sense I'm making here. I think a more complete example of what I'm talking about could serve to remedy a lot of these issues and show that what everybody wants (and already has) is still present, just moved to a more logical place. Jean-Paul ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
[Twisted-Python] Task-based documentation started
I have the beginnings of some task-based documentation available in twisted-docs (https://github.com/tdavis/twisted-docs) now. You can find the built version in the usual place (http://docs.recursivedream.com/twisted/) -- just remember to bust the cache. I chose serving web content as a starting point because it seems as common a task as any. I took some examples from the existing howto ( http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/web/howto/using-twistedweb.html), as well as added some examples of further learning and glossary entries to make the point. Obviously there's nothing completely usable here yet; it's primarily an exercise in showing how I'd like to split up sprawling, semi-random docs like *using-twistedweb* into more coherent, digestible, stackable pieces. A document to talk about core concepts (Site Objects, Resources, etc.), sections for supplementary features like Sessions, Virtual Hosts, etc. Another advantage of this style is that we can effortlessly stitch together our own tutorials (were that ever a goal) just by linking in step-wise fashion to ever-advanced tutorials which themselves wrap back around to core concepts like, in this case, Applications and the IService stack. It should be up to the user how deep into the rabbit hole they want to go; right now I have to slog through two sections to get to a part that tells me how to just serve a directory of HTML. Thoughts? ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Using SerialPort with t.a.s.Application
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 10:38 AM, Kevin Horn kevin.h...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 7:25 AM, Itamar Turner-Trauring ita...@itamarst.org wrote: A service is supposed to be something you can start and stop, and encapsulates a self-contained piece of business logic. -Itamar This or something very much like it should be in the Twisted Glossary. I'd love to see concise, human-readable explanations for all of Twisted's concepts! It's on the list, anyway... Kevin Horn ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] HTTPClient handling LF only servers
On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 1:39 PM, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On 06:28 pm, gl...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On Jan 25, 2011, at 6:09 PM, Kevin Horn wrote: Well, I can update the summary, but not the description, which is the really bad part. The description _is_ mutable, just only by certain magical people. (For the purpose of spam protection). For now, please feel free to attach a comment to any confusing ticket asking for a description update from someone who can do that; we should do this more often as the foci of various tickets shift. In the near future hopefully a trac admin (maybe me) will have enough time to more effectively curate the group of magical accounts and their attendant powers so that more people (especially documentation wonks like you and Tom) have that ability. I've added Kevin and Tom to the group who can do this. If someone would like to volunteer for the job of putting trusted people into this group, let me know. Thanks, I can now more efficiently exercise my obsessive compulsions! Jean-Paul ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
[Twisted-Python] Fingering Finger
In this thread, I hope to find a resolution to the issue of the Finger tutorial and efforts to sufficiently improve it or remove it. In the course of reviewing documentation-related tickets, I stumbled upon #1148 (http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/1148). Therein, Glyph first(?) put down a lot of things we've been discussing and agreeing upon in the Refactoring Documentation thread. One of the issues still up for debate is whether or not the Finger tutorial is sufficiently strong to survive the documentation overhaul. There are various points against it right now: - It isn't tested or even test*able* - It doesn't cover best practices as they relate to writing testable, maintainable code, etc. - It attempts to implement basically every main Twisted concept, often in contrived or poorly-executed ways - It has been said it has, ...at best, the potential for mediocrity. There are also enough tickets related to refactoring / rewriting it that a resolution would make a significant dent in the list of stale documentation tickets. Among these two year-old tickets are: - http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/532 - Big jump from finger18.py to finger19.py in tutorial - http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/626 - Split tutorial finger code into libraries - http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/2205 - Documentation codelistings need updating and tests This shouldn't be a blocker on anything Kevin and I are doing, but it'd be nice to concurrently have discussions on issues we'll need to address later. I'm also pretty anal about ticket lists and if these aren't going anywhere I'd love to close them ;) Cheers, Tom ___ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
Re: [Twisted-Python] Weekly Bug Summary
Mean open ticket age: 1032 days Mean time between ticket creation and ticket resolution: 238 days Mean time spent in review: 83 days Wow. Adding reduce these by at least one order of magnitude to my todo list. Gotta have goals! On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 12:05 AM, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: Bug summary __ Summary for 2011-01-16 through 2011-01-23 Opened Closed Total Change Enhancements: 3 6690 -3 Defects: 6 8547 -2 Tasks: 2 7 65 -5 Regressions: 0 1 1 -1 Total:11 22 1303-11 |== Type Changes |== Priority Changes |== Component Changes |Defect: -2 |High:+1 |Conch: -1 |Enhancement: -3 |Normal: -4 |Core:-3 |Regression: -1 |Low: -5 |Mail:-3 |Task: -5 |Lowest: -3 |Release Management: -1 |Trial: +0 |Web: -1 |Words: -2 Total TicketsOpen Tickets New / Reopened Bugs __ = High = [#4810] XMPPClientFactory eating away subscribe stanzas. (opened by magicblaze) defect words http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4810 = Normal = [#4809] usage.Options should handle error messages in a consistent and user-friendly way (opened by tpratt) enhancement core http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4809 [#4811] @unittest.expectedFailure decorator breaks trial (opened by ivank) defect trial http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4811 [#4813] provide permissions accessor for filepath (opened by cyli) enhancement core http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4813 [#4814] HTTPClient doesn't handle servers that use \n separators instead of \r\n (opened by jasonjwwilliams) (CLOSED, duplicate) defect webhttp://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4814 [#4816] twistd --uid without --gid breaks (opened by thobbs) (CLOSED, duplicate) defect core http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4816 [#4817] IPv4Address and UNIXAddress not-equal comparison is broken (opened by ivank) defect core http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4817 [#4818] Determine standard structure of Howtos or Tasks (opened by binjured) taskcore http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4818 [#4712] Missing bits of statinfo accessors in FilePath (opened by cyli) (CLOSED, fixed) enhancement core http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4712 = Low = [#3372] deprecate --extra option to trial (opened by exarkun) (CLOSED, fixed) tasktrial http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/3372 Closed Bugs __ = Normal = [#4054] Delete all of the out-of-date mumbo jumbo from the im howto (opened by exarkun, closed by thijs, fixed) defect words http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4054 [#4773] The core howto index should link to the endpoints howto (opened by exarkun, closed by cyli, fixed) enhancement core http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4773 [#4738] ckeygen man page has wrong summary and synopsis (opened by exarkun, closed by cyli, fixed) defect conch http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4738 [#4740] Use strcred for `twistd mail` authentication options (opened by exarkun, closed by cyli, fixed) enhancement mail http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4740 [#4712] Missing bits of statinfo accessors in FilePath (opened by cyli, closed by cyli, fixed) enhancement core http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4712 [#4786] twcgi duplicate header (opened by lvh, closed by tenth, fixed) regression webhttp://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4786 [#4042] [Documentation] It is too hard to figure out how to do trivial common-case sending email with twisted.mail (opened by arkanes, closed by thijs, fixed) taskmail http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4042 [#3412] Include link to IMAP Server Tester in Twisted IMAP documentation (opened by biny, closed by thijs, wontfix) taskmail http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/3412 [#4491] Release Twisted 10.0.1 (opened by exarkun, closed by thijs, invalid) taskrelease management http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4491 [#4814] HTTPClient doesn't handle servers that use \n separators instead of \r\n (opened by jasonjwwilliams, closed by exarkun, duplicate) defect
Re: [Twisted-Python] Refactoring Documentation
On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 10:02 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote: On Jan 22, 2011, at 3:18 PM, Tom Davis wrote: On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.com wrote: On Jan 20, 2011, at 11:20 PM, Tom Davis wrote: If branches that are out there *don't* meet these standards, commenting on their tickets and getting them deleted or closed as invalid (as appropriate) would be a big help too. Lots of languishing tickets that nobody knows what to do with is not a good thing, and there's plenty of opportunities for interested parties to reopen tickets, attach new patches, and object in various ways, so you shouldn't be too concerned about stepping on toes. Focus is a valuable commodity. I was wondering to what extent it would be helpful to actually reply to all the tickets, or just the ones that seem to have actionable next steps. I will try to find something to ask or opine on in each of the documentation tickets so we can get them moving along or removed. Getting rid of dead tickets is almost as important as actually getting valid tickets moved along. I think this effort will be hugely valuable. Will continue commenting on tickets and asserting non-existent power to get them resolved! ;) Part of my comment about low-hanging fruit was to help you get familiar with and integrated into the development process. Going through the process of getting patches reviewed and accepted will be _much_ easier if you go through the motions of doing a few trivial things first. In fact you may want to just pick up a couple of trivial non-docs patches as well, which might help you on documenting the development process :). bit.ly/easy-twisted-tickets might help you there. I will find an easy ticket or few to bang out. I just replied here ( http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/2491) in an attempt to get started on one that doesn't already have a long history. After spending about an hour going over the easy tickets, it seems many of them are in odd states. Either they're done and waiting on something undefined or there is an incomplete debate in the comments or the owner disappeared or... well, there are lots of examples. Maybe this is just me being dense or whatever, but I think (at least as a newcomer) I could mass-update all these tickets with Guidance! and it would more often than not be a relevant comment given the state of the ticket. No, this is not you being dense. At least among the core developers in Boston, this is a widely-recognized and frequently-complained-about problem, and it's something I'd like everyone doing ticket reviews to please think about. Reviewers: if you make a comment on a ticket, but you don't say what you want to happen next, then you have effectively killed progress on that ticket until some other reviewer comes along and contradicts you to get things moving again. This is especially true if you make one trivial comment on the ticket and remove the review keyword, but don't say please address these issues and then merge or please address these issues and then resubmit for review. If you've done a partial review, and made a comment like I don't like this aspect of the design or please update copyright dates or your docstring formatting is wrong, please note in your comment that this is not a complete review, and *don't* remove the review keyword. Removing the keyword will introduce additional latency for the contributor, when other reviewers might still come along and attach more comprehensive feedback. There are few things more discouraging than having one free weekend every six months to work on a ticket, and to come back every time to oops, you forgot to update the copyright date and insert a blank line in one file of your 300-line patch. So, Tom: mass updating those tickets wouldn't be helpful, but an update every couple of days with a specific question on one of these I-don't-know-what-to-do tickets would be great. Your question on tm.tl/2491 was a definite step forward. Awesome! I'm sure a lot of this has to do with the fact that once you maintain and work on something like this for a decade you take a lot for granted, especially with regard to your own policies and procedures. It becomes tedious to provide (or just difficult to enumerate) all the details necessary to new people. Hopefully as I become more familiar with them I can ensure some of the tedious/forgotten corners become documented in a way that makes it easier. And just point out when the current status of something is way too ambiguous to be actionable for more than a couple folks who are too busy to deal with it. Here's a great example of what I'm talking about (and I apologize for the mid-message digression, but I think it's relevant...): http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4636. This seems totally trivial, but five months later __all__ was never changed in t.i.main and JP's buildbot
Re: [Twisted-Python] Refactoring Documentation
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 5:35 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz gl...@twistedmatrix.comwrote:
On Jan 21, 2011, at 8:29 AM, exar...@twistedmatrix.com wrote:
I don't think it makes sense to put anything on Launchpad for now.
Eventually it needs to go into the canonical Twisted repository, but if
it's easier to leave it in GitHub for now, that's fine.
The only reason I even suggested Launchpad in the first place was to
suggest a place where you could immediately stick a branch of the Twisted
tree proper without having commit access, so that you could experiment
within that tree. ('bzr get lp:twisted'). I don't believe we have a mirror
on github, but maybe somebody could correct me.
As long as we're all on the same page as far as the eventual target of
these docs (i.e. in the Twisted tree, part of some official structure) then
please feel free to use whatever tools make that easier for you, your
existing github repo included.
We are definitely on the same page. I never wanted the new documentation to
remain separate from Twisted proper. It should be part of the main
repository, build process, etc.
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Re: [Twisted-Python] Refactoring Documentation
Wow! Okay, so, not being really familiar with the list etiquette combined with the fact that the topic has digressed a bit, I hope you'll forgive the non-inline reply here. I want to hit the main points of what everybody said / asked, but let it be known that I read all of it! How can we combine these efforts, or at least keep from working at cross purposes? I see from your link above that you are building your own Sphinx project. Perhaps you would be better off working from the results of the Lore2sphinx conversion? Are you modifying existing docs or working from scratch? Let's get together on this! Hey Kevin! Glyph and Jean-Paul got me up to speed (somewhat) on the whole lore2sphinx thing last night—though they were rather unclear as to how close it is to completion. (which you addressed later in this thread) I certainly want to combine our efforts as much as possible and I'm not too worried about working at cross purposes; your main task seems to be converting the existing documentation while mine is reorganizing, editing, and standardizing it. I'm sure our paths will start to cross when the lore conversion is complete and you have a huge Sphinx project ready to be properly organized and catalogued. My hope is we can then begin the process of merging the two sides of this coin. My current plan (which should become a bit more clear throughout this massive reply) is to start from scratch *but* modify existing documentation wherever possible. If a piece of documentation fits in a hole in the structure and I can get by with a *mv* and some editing, that's what I'd like to do—it seems the most pragmatic approach. So here's what I'm kind of thinking as far as combining efforts: 1) I'll continue with the Project Documentation conversion, while Tom works on the other bits. Should be fairly easy to combine them, I'm thinking. 2) Let's leave the Project Documentation pretty much as-is for the moment, until the Sphinx convo is done. 3) I wonder if at least some of the task-based docs shouldn't be put into the project sections, and then just linked to from the task-based section? This. Point of fact, (3) is already implemented; that example task simply links to *projects/web/tasks/serve*. This strikes me as the most logical layout as the tasks are all specific to a particular project (the only iffy one being Core which is sort of a few projects plus the foundation)—we just want to highlight some of them. On to Glyph's reply... There are many outstanding documentation branches which are substantial improvements, which need to be edited and merged - the trial tutorial among them. It would be great if your efforts could start with getting those landed, turning the crank on the process to get our users better documentation in the interim, as you survey the existing documentation. I definitely agree that resolving the low-hanging fruit first is a good idea. For finishing docs branch X to make sense, my personal belief is that X should: - Still be relevant in terms of best practices and simply what's available - If project documentation, have outstanding issues that a passing familiarity with the project [right now] will be sufficient to close them (I could spend time learning one project, or the same time improving *all* the documentation) - Adhere to whatever documentation standards we agree upon, if much is to left to do. I guess my overall opinion here is that, yes, if relatively minor edits can bring a branch close enough to completion that we can get it out there to help newcomers *now*, let's do that. If a branch is more of a draft and requires a good deal of fleshing out (or is simply stale), it's probably worth nailing down the structure and previously mentioned docs standards before I just create more work for myself (or others) down the road. Finally, my biggest hurdle right now is not knowing how to *find* said branches. I don't see documentation as a category in Trac and common keyword searches didn't show up much for me. I'm sure this is an easy question to answer, though. What *should* a newcomer who reads this document know by the end of it? I'm not sure because I can't see how a practical guide to creating something so generic really fits in the grand scheme of things. I think if you want to create a TCP server from scratch you must first create the Universe! In this case, that means learning how Twisted addresses the *concept* of a server before ever bothering to write one so generic. My general beef is that many documents seem to make an attempt to appeal to everybody and in doing so don't sufficiently help anybody. Maybe I can justify that claim better with examples of better (at least more targeted) documents. A massive pile of improved documentation would of course be useful, but a good start would be a clear statement of requirements and audience. (As well as an enumeration of*different* audiences that different documents might
[Twisted-Python] Refactoring Documentation
I've been using (and threatening to work on) Twisted for a few years now. It seems like every time I get back into it, I need to dig up old code or Google queries just to get started. Yesterday, Jean-Paul introduced me to the trial-tutorial branchhttp://twistedmatrix.com/trac/browser/branches/trial-tutorial-2443-2 which has shed some light on the basics of using trial and testing Twisted client/server applications in general. Until he mentioned it in IRC, I was stuck looking at the actual tests for protocols and deciding which parts of that were generically useful to me. I agreed to finish up that documentation so that it could finally (four years later) be added to trunk (and more importantly, twistedmatrix.com). But after thinking about it, I believe the problem runs much deeper than just the lack of a branch merge. Reading code to find answers isn't rocket science; I've been programming long enough to be comfortable doing it. But I probably have to resort to reading Twisted's code about 8 billion percent more often than any other codebase. And reading code is a hurdle. Reading through Twisted's semi-random, 45-point FAQ is a hurdle—and recommending it as a starting point is unhelpful at best. The core documentation isn't awesome either, given that it has a tendency to be overly cryptic and link to API documentation that is often incomplete or generally unhelpful. As one very basic example, see: http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/servers.html. Let's just review a few things wrong with this page: - It's tutorial page #1, but basically tells me I need to read howto/plugins.html first if I am writing an application (whatever that is), as opposed to a TCP, SSL, and Unix socket server. And it's the wrong place for UDP. - It attempts to introduce Protocols and Factories—two of Twisted's most important concepts—and does neither particularly well. I know that Protocols (usually) inherit from t.i.p.Protocol and may be instantiated for a variety of reasons and aren't (usually) persistent. I also know that Factories instantiate Protocols and give a reference to themselves so protocols can access and modify the persistent configuration. I am told I need to implement some interface (or something) to actually listen on a host/port. I think. - At one point TCP4ServerEndpoint is instantiated (but never imported); its explanation is left to a digression into the endpoints API, which has its own issues. Suffice it to say the document doesn't give me sufficient reason to actually use the endpoints API. - Later on, we just use reactor.listenTCP()—which our previous digression (if bothered to click through and read) claims is not preferable. By the end of the *servers* tutorial (and after reading some linked documentation), here's all I *really* know: 1. Factories create protocols somehow 2. Protocols have methods like connectionMade, connectionLost, and dataReceived to handle events 3. There are other protocols with other methods. One that I know of, anyway. 4. I may need to write a state machine (???) 5. I should use an Endpoint or maybe a Service or reactor (but probably not!) 6. I should also use Application for serious business Moving forward, howto/clients.html duplicates a lot of these things and fills in some gaps in knowledge while creating more holes. Meanwhile, I still never wanted to create a QOTD or Echo server. I think the point has been made. My *real* point, though, is that I love Twisted. And I'm constantly wishing it was more accessible to newcomers. Twisted is Python's oldest and most mature event-based networking engine and despite its decade of existence it remains largely confusing and obscure to the majority of Python programmers who come upon it. It contains concepts and standards that are alien to the average Python programmer, but they make a lot of sense and have a lot more consistency and predictability than the documentation conveys. I want to fix that, among other things. And as luck may have it, I like writing documentation. And I know at least enough Twisted to get the high-level stuff in order and improve the documentation to the point that people will keep reading long enough to make sense of the idea of Twisted and be able to implement some basic things and expand upon them later. There are some things I *do* want to accomplish early on: - Make the docs accessible (a lot is hidden and hard to find) - Make them more concise and useful to somebody who doesn't want to know the 50 different ways to skin every cat (including the ones you should never use) - Make them introduce and explain Twisted in a way that somebody as dumb as me can understand it. This means talking about protocols, factories, deferreds, etc. in a way that doesn't require thousands of words of circular explanations, digressions, and duplications. - Document the different Twisted projects
