Whao. Quite a bite to process here.
Let me begin by saying that I deeply respect the efforts various
people have put into TG over the years. And successfully so in many
respects. I myself have so to varying degrees, and it was a good
experience.
Also I'm very in general very satisfied with the technical aspects of
TG2. I personally don't care about documentation (use the source,
luke), and thus have always been able to unleash it's powers.
But since the advent of TG2, TurboGears as whole has been declining in
community and overall adoption. And I believe this is due to 3 major
factors:
- the early announcment caused anxiety in the community. If you plan
on starting a new project, you don't want to invest into "old"
technology. But the new, shiny TG2 arrived later than expected.
- splitting the development force. Some of us were committed to TG1,
as they had large installations. Others jumped onto the TG2 bandwagon
- the overall tendency of developers of TG2 not to stick with
existing dependencies or approaches, but instead to go for the "next
big thing". See for example
KID -> genshi -> mako -> jinja, TGWidgets -> ToscaWidgets ->
ToscaWidgets2 -> Mark's Widgets (sorry, forgot the name), TG Admin ->
Sprockets -> SPROX -> TG Admin again (I'm unsure with the last list,
never cared much about these things)
As a result of this, I think we couldn't create enough of an eco-
system of 3rd-party contributions in terms of pluggable apps,
documentation writers, community and so forth.
Another "issue" is built-in, and partially reflected above already:
the best-of-breed-and-lots-of-dependencies approach has benefits - but
also downsides. Documentation is split, bugs span across frameworks
and packages, releases need careful testing and packaging, whole
packages depending on one single developer - who might lose interest
or can't contribute anymore - and so forth.
And now this new route. I understand it. I see chances for having a
larger development force behind it, and thus to mitigate quite a few
aforementioned problems.
But it will provoke the same anxiety, it will leave those of us behind
that have existing TG2 installations (let alone TG1). And please don't
pretend there will be a reasonable stable way to make the next big
thing backwards compatible. TG1 vs. TG2 has proven enough that this is
harder than one might think, and it's debatable if it is a worthy goal.
So, to wrap it up: I won't and can't speak out against this move - you
guys do, what you do. It's a technically sound decision. I will keep
an eye on what comes out of it. I might even move my existing projects
over to it (but then, there are 10 developers working with TG2 now -
that's a *lot* of brain to shift around)
But IMHO selling it under the turbo-gears brand is a mistake, or at
least misleading. Call it something fresh, something new, attract a
community - and try & stick with it, instead of moving faster than a
large group of people can.
From a technical POV, I strongly hope that you stick with WSGI as the
glue that binds things together. To me, it's a close-to-perfect
abstraction that cuts the various aspects of a web-app on clear, yet
still powerful interacting components.
Also, composable apps would be a great thing I guess.
And last but not least, keep or even ramp up the focus on testing, and
testability. TG2 is already much better in that respect from a user's
perspective, but the last sprint showed that testing the core is
harder than one might want it.
All in all - no hard feelings. But no excitement either - to much good
work is down the drains due to this IMHO.
Diez
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