Most of what you say about the mod wsgi issue is accurate.  The docs seem to 
lack something, but I wouldn't knock turbogears.  The few developers that work 
with Turbogears, and whom I depend on, are fantastic.  There is always the time 
available vs product quality when dealing with opensource products.  Turbogears 
2.1 is in a transition stage as the developers have joined the pyramid 
project.  From what I have read they are going to bring the turbogears into 
that project that should produce the best ever web development  tool.  I just 
recently went through the same thing you have been through with the mod wsgi 
deploy.  Many hours spent trying to figure it out.  It is a week spot, and I am 
sure the developers will get to that eventually.  Since you seem to be a good 
developer yourself.  Why don't you continue your thread on mod wsgi 
deployment.  It would benefit the Turbogears project.

--- On Fri, 1/14/11, bvdb <[email protected]> wrote:

From: bvdb <[email protected]>
Subject: [TurboGears] Sand in their Joints - TG and mod_wsgi
To: "TurboGears" <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, January 14, 2011, 7:29 AM

- Rant about TurboGears2 -

After some years of experience with PHP development (and a bit with
RoR and J2EE) I decided it's time for improvement. Python was often
mentioned by friends as a superior scripting language, I checked it
out and yes: Handling of strings, arrays, functions and objects is
much more concise, there is a fresh spirit of keeping things simple
and clear.
This should be the platform of choice for new projects of mine and
something I could recommend honestly to clients, partners and friends.
>From all python web frameworks TurboGears appeared as first choice,
mainly because of SQLalchemy (having experience with deficiencies of
ActiveRecord in RoR).

Now, before the first 'hello world' from the apache webserver there
was some configuration to do for the wsgi interface. PHP works easily
in this aspect, but one can accept a bit more effort for a less
popular but superior platform.

TurboGears offers a "standard deployment pattern", that sounded well
thought-out:
http://turbogears.org/2.1/docs/main/Deployment/Standard.html
What happened over the next days can be followed in the thread
"modwsgi_deploy Helper Script" on this newsgroup.

- In short, it's a mess. -
The steps described on ../ModWSGI.html don't work as described,
contain implicit assumptions that other installations were done
before, mix names ('myapp' / 'tg2env'), do not mention projects (being
organized _inside_ virtual environments, right?) etc.
Then if, after consulting this group, the /apache folder is finally
created, the config files therein contain paths to folders never seen
before ('/usr/local/turbogears'). So although making some effort to
install a special config-generator script, this does not bother to
test the paths it uses.
Part of the README that is generated in apache/ repeats the very steps
that were neccessary to generate it.
Then myapp.wsgi does not do much more than define some paths that
could easily be handled via command-line.
- end of mess-description -

The whole process seems to be aimed more at mystifying a python-apache
deployment.
Ok, one might see this as part of the open source culture, that is not
always efficient and functional, like every culture.

Then I read the TG home page again: "Rapid web developement
framework", and 2.1 claims "Build a database-driven app in minutes!" -
but they missed out ".. albeit it might take a couple of days to
configure your box for 'Hello world'".
That's where "Sand in my Joints", an old anti-hippie punk song (by
Wire) came to my mind..

Did someone from TG ever try to convince a developer using another
language to switch over to TG? In this case you would have shown him
how easy it was to install .. and then you'd notice that you were
wrong. Seems no one ever did this test (and TG 2.0 is out since May
2009).
I came from PHP to Python because the language is so much more clean,
concise and elegant. It seems this was only one part of the python
community while the other half cherishes its nerd attitude.
Maybe the rest of the package works perfect, but judging from the docs
it looks to me there are more blind spots.

It's sad because the concept of combining SQLalchemy, ToscaWidgets and
Genshi is promising.
It seems what the people from Django achieve is not (only) setting the
words nicely in the docs but organizing the setup and structures in a
clear way, then it actually _works_ nicely, so the docs describing it
come out this way.

My proposal to the developers is: Quit TurboGears, and contribute your
knowledge about SQLalchemy (and maybe Pylons, Genshi, Mako,
Toscawidgets etc) to extend Django.
This way a python web platform could evolve strong enough to compete
against PHP, RoR and J2EE alternatives - not only conceptually but in
working systems.

/ Bernd

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