Wednesday, June 4, 2008

A Place for Everyone

After an intense volley on the Twisted mail list, phone conversations, IRC discussions, and lots of thinking by everyone, we are pleased to announce the latest addition to Twisted: Twisted Community Code.

This is what Launchpad calls a "super project" or "project group" but what it means for the Twisted community is that anyone with Twisted code can play. Some details are up on a dedicated wiki page, with more info, help, and documentation to come.

Over the years, many have complained that the Twisted core developers are elitist perfectionists who make it impossible for anyone to contribute code. Most of us would object to such a sweeping statement, but we can't deny that there is at least a little truth in that complaint. The ultimate motivation for our standards and adherence to them is quality. We want Twisted to be as stable, useful, and maintainable as possible. However, quality always comes with a cost, and we're tired of paying it.

What about those who are just learning Twisted? Who want to jump in and contribute some code without having to spend months learning not only Twisted itself, but also its coding standard and our famous review process? Do we have a place in the community for them? Now, the answer to that is "yes" :-)

And this isn't just a dumping ground for newbs; within a day of creating this "super project" on Launchpad -- and with no public announacement -- we had three projects join (today there are five), all by serious long-time Twisted hackers. We expect that folks will contribute everything from excellent to horrible code: we encourage all to do so. Through such things as participation in the community, conversations, and voluntary peer review, good code will get better (and may be merged into Twisted proper) and bad code will learn to mend its evil ways. We have wanted to provide just such a space where everyone in the Twisted community can participate with what they love. Thanks to Canonical's and Launchpad platform, we're starting to do this.

You might notice that the "Twisted Community Code" lives at the "tx" URL. This came up in the email discussions mentioned above. Also, some of the projects are prefixed with "tx." The use of this term is likened to the "py" that is used for general Python projects and we encourange those creating Twisted projects to use the analogous "tx." However, Glyph said it well:
The whole point here is that it's a suggestion and a convention, not a mandate from the core team like so many things in the Twistedverse.
Phil Christensen has graciously agreed to take a leadership role in the management of this online community, and we give him many hearty pirate cheers for this. If you have any questions, feel free to send an email to the Twisted mail list... you'll likely get a quick response from Phil :-)

We're hoping that both new Twisted projects and those that have felt alienated in the past can find a home on Launchpad with Twisted Community Code Team Alpha Super Awesome Cool Dynamite Wolf Squadron.


1 comment:

drewp said...

Thanks for watching Shrek 3!