Chuck Esterbrook wrote:
It's difficult to say what is essential. That differs from person to person both in terms of the kits and also what each kit contains.I absolutely agree. My desire to pare it down has more to do with newbie experience and docs than taking up hard drive space or any notion of lean elegance or anything like that.
For example, I'm considering volunteering to get a new release going, but I have NEVER used CGIWrapper, COMKit, MiddleKit, MiscUtils, PSP, TaskKit, or UserKit. How can I be responsible to test (and possibly oversee the documentation of) them?
Is distutils easy? I don't know how to get it to do any of the following things:
Good point. Distutils is not apt-get. It should have been... sigh.
My point was supposed to be that if they can install Webkit, they can also install MiddleKit. By whatever means.
Fair enough. I was hoping to get into that discussion of what really are people's minimum set. I put forth one possible "plan". In fact, I proposed adding to the standard set.I could go to vendors of those packages and ask them to remove various parts, but they would probably say: 1. Your minimal set is not someone else's minimal set. 2. Breaking them apart increases our release work.
...which is what I say to breaking up Webware.
I don't think that breaking them apart increases release work. I don't think that COMKit for example should need to be rev'd each time that webkit is. Most of these bits should be quite stable, yes? So they just chug along as they are, throughout Webkit updates. Why make a new "release" of COMKit if none of the code has changed? This is how it seems to work now; we increment the version numbers on everything, even code that hasn't changed.
But never having done a release, I'm speaking from the hip here. Perhaps your experience has varied.
Besides, WebKit (and maybe PSP?) is the only Webware component that is hard to release. The others have plenty of unit or regression tests and can be released on very short notice.
That's good news.
I agree, and I think that Geoff made that point pretty well, also. What's really necessary "next" is a point release. My proposal should be considered only as a bigger milestone after that.One final note: One reason why Webware is released infrequently (besides the fact that I have no free time any more) is that when people to go to release they throw in a bunch of requirements that aren't really required.
There hasn't been a release in a long time. If we simply shipped what we currently have in its current form as a 0.9, that would certainly be of value to the community.
It's surely not my intent to "throw in a bunch of requirements". And I'd say that your point about "everyone's essentials" can be made about everyone's requirements. This is the discussion that I was hoping to generate... what should Webkit become next. I for one think that it needs form processing. I don't expect everyone to agree with me.
There's another point of view that I find compelling: that webkit is basically "done" and only needs bug-fixes from here on out. That its flexibility is its power, so let's not go messing with it. I'm gathering that this is the point of view of you and other core members like Geoff.
My own firm has already figured out how to use Webware as-is, too. No missing features hold us up. What drove me to start up this discussion was my experience trying to introduce two newbies to Webkit. Both are programmers who've used lots of different languages and frameworks, but are relatively new to python and webware. Both had trouble with common things:
1. getting it hooked up to a web server 2. knowing how to lay out code (examples are for servlets, not apps) 3. how to do html forms 4. how to hook into outside objects like databases
Now, I'm not interested in things like "market share" or "mind share", because as I said, my firm has solved all of the above gotchas and has a good workflow process. But others in the list seem frustrated by these issues... so I wanted to try and help.
I'm very grateful to you and to the group for Webware. It's made my business more fun and more responsive to client needs. I'd like to "give something back" by perhaps helping Webkit to the next milestone. That's what this is all about.
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