I've been working through a lot of feedback from the TurboGears mailing list about how we should respond to the Repoze.bfg / Pylons merger. We've had a couple of IRC chats, I've spent a lot of time talking to various people in the community, and even more talking to Ben Bangert and Chris McDonough.
And I believe we've come to a solid consensus, and that it's time to make a decision. I didn't want to rush this, and very much wanted to weigh all the options appropriately. But now that that thinking is done, it's time to jump in with both feet. TurboGears will be merging into the Pylons Project To understand why we are making this move and what this means, a bit of background is needed. We built TurboGears 2 on top of a the Pylons framework, and have been working with Ben and the Pylons folks for a couple of years now. Pylons is a lightweight framework that is neither full stack nor opinionated. The Pylons team has recently joined up with the repoze.bfg folks to create a new low-level non-opinionated web application development library called Pyramid which is based on repoze.bfg and now part of the larger Pylons Project. You can use Pyramid to build web applications right now. It has more plug points, and is in many ways more flexible and extendable than the original Pylons and should provide an even better foundation for a full stack framework. Fortunately the Pylons Project leaders recognize that a "low level" framework is not enough. Most web developers need to get things done quickly, and want a full stack setup and ready to go, so they can immediately start developing features rather than infrastructure. That's where we come in. TurboGears was the pioneer of the "full stack" set of integrated components approach among the modern Python web frameworks, and we have already developed many full stack tools. So, our first step will be to add the TurboGears2 package to the legacy support in the Pylons Project. So, the Pylons 1.x and Turbogears2 packages will be maintained side by side as part of a single overall project. This change won't impact the TG2 code, except that we will be officially acknowledging that both codebases are tightly linked and now are part of a single project. Maintaining the existing Pylons1+tg code will only be one part of the larger Pylons Project. Ultimately, we will also be working with the Pylons Project folks to create a new generation of rapid application development tools on top of Pyramid, as part of the TurboGears "Full Stack" philosophy. We will help to pick default templating engines, default session support, default data persistence mechanisms, integrate widget libraries and build high level tools like OAuth or OpenID support. The main goal of this merger will be to reach across framework boundaries, work together with with Repoze, Pylons, and other web framework developers to build a set of high level tools that make building complex, modern web applications easier and faster. There's a lot we can learn from each-other, and even more that we can do if we work through our differences and find new ways to collaborate. Over the next few weeks we'll be moving repositories, migrating tickets, consolidating infrastructure, and discussing many exciting new developments. Thanks for your support. It's been a great ride, and I have a feeling that the best is yet to come. -- Mark Ramm -- PS. Don't worry, TurboGears 1 will also continue to be maintained, and supported, and we'll even have a major release soon. We don't have all the details worked out yet, but you should also expect some anouncments over the comming weeks about whatever changes that we'll be making to that infrastructure. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears?hl=en.
