Annoucing Twisted 12.1

On behalf of Twisted Matrix Laboratories, I am pleased to announce the release of Twisted 12.1.

107 tickets are closed by this release, with the following highlights:

• The revival of the kqueue reactor for BSD platforms.
• epoll is now the default reactor under Linux after a fix to handle files on stdin/stdout.
• New reactors supporting GTK3 and GObject-Introspection.
• Several enhancements regarding file descriptors passing: systemd support for servers, ability to send and receive file descriptors for IReactorUNIX and an AMP argument using that feature.
• Support for IPv6 literals in connectTCP.
• Persistent connections support for the new HTTP client.

This is the last Twisted release supporting Python 2.5. For more information, see the NEWS file here:

http://twistedmatrix.com/Releases/Twisted/12.1/NEWS.txt

Download it now from:

http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.1.0.tar.bz2 or

http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.1.0.win32-py2.5.msi or
http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.1.0.win32-py2.6.msi or
http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.7/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.1.0.win32-py2.7.msi


Thanks to the supporters of Twisted via the Software Freedom Conservancy and to the many contributors for this release.

Twisted 12.1.0pre1

Thanks to the efforts of Thomas Hervé, Twisted 12.1.0pre1 pre-release is now available for testing.You can find the tarballs here:

http://people.canonical.com/~therve/Twisted/12.1.0pre1/

Among the 106 tickets closed since our last release, you can find:

• The revival of the kqueue reactor for BSD platforms.
• epoll is now the default reactor under Linux after a fix to handle files on stdin/stdout.
• New reactors supporting GTK3 and GObject-Introspection.
• Several enhancements regarding file descriptors passing: systemd support for servers, ability to send and receive file descriptors across Unix sockets, and an AMP argument using that feature.
• Support for IPv6 literals in connectTCP.
• Persistent connections support for the new HTTP client.

This will be the last release supporting Python 2.5. Please give it a round of tests to help make a great release!

Congratulations and welcome to Twisted's summer interns

Twisted is excited to be supporting 4 full-time summer interns from around the world through 2 internship programs this summer.

Google Summer of Code internships

Expanded Endpoints Support, by Ashwini Oruganti (IRC nick ashfall)

Ashwini joins us from the Manipal Institute of Technology in Manipal, India. She has already worked on and closed out a number of Twisted tickets and has previously contributed to Evolution and Sugar Labs.

Her project:

Recently, two new APIs, IStreamServerEndpoint and IStreamClientEndpoint were added to Twisted, for specifying what address the servers should listen for connections and what address a client should connect to, respectively. But not all of the addresses that Twisted supports have this endpoint support added to them; presently endpoint support has been implemented for TCP, SSL and UNIX domain sockets. My project deals with adding more endpoint implementation to Twisted, some involving wrappers around the existing APIs (e.g. serial ports, standard I/O), others involving making fresh APIs where setting up connections was difficult before the addition of the endpoints (e.g. SOCKS and HTTPS proxies).

Python 3 preparation, by Vladimir Perić (IRC nick vperic)

Vladimir joins us from Czech Technical University in Prague. Last year he was a Google Summer of Code student with SymPy.

His project:

Python 3 is the future of Python. If Twisted is to see continued usage in the future, it will have to be ported, and rather sooner than later. As Twisted is a large and complicated code-base, this process needs to be done with care, ensuring that any code written remains compatible with the currently supported versions. The test-driven development methodology Twisted uses will ensure no regressions happen and will ease the maintenance of the code-base.

Automatic Coding Standard Enforcement, by Raphael Shu (IRC nick zomux)

Raphael joins us from Tsukuba University in Japan, where he uses Python daily in his NLP research.

His project:

Twisted applies certain naming and style standards to all contributed code. Currently, a human reviewer needs to check all of these things. The purpose of this project is to develop a tool which can automatically make these simple, mechanical checks, freeing up human reviewer time to focus on more important aspects of proposed changes. Finally, it will speed up the review process.

Software Freedom Conservancy / GNOME Outreach Program internship

We are also excited to be working with the Software Freedom Conservancy and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women this summer. You can read more about the initiative and our work to encourage diverse participation in open source communities here. Through this initiative we have a 4th paid, full-time internship this summer:

Improving Twisted Mail and Twisted Core, by Fei Tan (IRC nick argonemyth)

Fei joins us from Grand Bay, Mauritius, where she works as a freelance web developer.

She will improve Twisted Mail on a number of fronts, including improving API documentation, adding more examples, adding more HOWTOs, and improved test coverage.

Please join me in welcoming Ashwini, Vladimir, Raphael, and Fei, whose internships start next week. Expect a torrent of code reviews and some record-breaking high scores list stats this summer!

Thank you Google for giving us this paid mentorship opportunity, and thank you to the Python Software Foundation for supporting us as our Google Summer of Code umbrella organization.

Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women

Twisted is participating in Google's Summer of Code this year. If you're a student interested in working on Twisted as part of a paid internship, please visit our Google SoC page. We use best practices like in-depth code reviews and full coverage unit tests, so this is a great way to improve your technical skills whether you're a beginner or an expert programmer.

In addition, Twisted and its non-profit home the Software Freedom Conservancy have partnered with the GNOME Outreach Program for Women to fund an internship for one woman to spend the summer participating in and contributing to Twisted, while being mentored by Jessica McKellar. Jessica is a long-time Twisted contributor as well as a software engineer and an organiser, among other things, of the Boston Python Workshops for women.

Unlike Google's program, the outreach program is not restricted to students; if you qualify, we do encourage you to apply to both. This internship is appropriate for any level of open source experience. If you have worked on an open source project before, great! If not, we'll help you learn the development and communication tools we use as part of the internship. Some Python experience is a prerequisite, and a small initial contribution to Twisted is a part of applying (if this sounds intimidating, don't worry, we'll help you pick a task to complete and you'll have lots of support as you work through submitting your first patch.) Please check out the full project description and apply today!

Announcing Twisted 12.0

Thanks to Thomas Hervé, we are proud to announce the release of Twisted 12.0.

47 tickets are closed by this release, among them:

• A fix to the GTK2 reactor preventing unnecessary wake-ups 
• Preliminary support of IPV6 on the server side
• Several fixes to the new protocol-based TLS implementation
• Improved core documentation's main page 

Twisted no longer supports Python 2.4, the latest supported version is 2.5.

For more information, see the NEWS file here: http://twistedmatrix.com/Releases/Twisted/12.0/NEWS.txt

Download it now from:
http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.0.0.tar.bz2 or
http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.5/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.0.0.win32-py2.5.msi or
http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.0.0.win32-py2.6.msi or
http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.7/T/Twisted/Twisted-12.0.0.win32-py2.7.msi

Thanks to the supporters of Twisted via the Software Freedom Conservancy and to the many contributors for this release.

December Sprint Report

Twisted sprint? Twisted sprint! Here's the final Twisted sprint report of 2011, from our December 10th event at Smarterer in Boston.

David Sturgis:

• was Sprint Host and Food Wrangler
• discussed miscellaneous twisted.web feature

JP Calderone:

• investigated 64 bit Windows 7 IPv6 problems
• finished #5383: Provide a library for simple valued named constants
• finished #5084: Accept IPv6 address literals (with embedded scope ids) in IReactorTCP.listenTCP
• reviewed #3420: twisted.web.client persistent connections
• reviewed #1902: compatibility work-around for commercial SSH 2.0.12 misbehaviours
• reviewed #5400: Change UDP port to have an explicit state machine, and no FileDescriptor dependency
• reviewed #3648: twisted.cred.credentials.UsernameHashedPassword doesn't hash password strings when checkPassword

This was the last sprint for JP as a Bostonian. We will miss you!

Itamar:

• worked on #5427: Improve core documentation index page
• reviewed #5383: Provide a library for simple valued named constants

Alex Levy:

• made headway on several website and documentation improvements

Glyph:

• discussed and then worked on #1956: Make a less sucky producer/consumer API

I (Jessica McKellar):

• reviewed #5427: Improve core documentation index page
• reviewed #5429: Documentation index
• reviewed #5422: pbgtk2.py example is excessively complex

Thank you David for organizing this, and Smarterer for hosting.

Thank you to everyone who closed out 2011 with contributions to Twisted!

November Sprint Report

November saw another successful Sprint at the Smarterer.com offices, thanks to a smaller but extremely busy group of developers:

Reviewmeister(ess) Jessica McKellar secured second place in the Twisted High Score list with an impressive number of reviews, including:

• #3037: "loseWriteConnection breaks loseConnection" (now resolved)
• #4262: "Multicast documentation is misleading" (now resolved)
• #538: "Website-template.tpl is out of date"

She also resolved #1247: ("kqreactor timeout error (traceback)"), and opened #5385, #5386, and #5387, while resolving #5060: ("Correct python requirement in twisted/topfiles/setup.py").

Not to mention all the tickets reviewed at recent Sprints which have since been resolved! (Though, to mention them anyway, #1247, #2115, #2447, #2498, #2507, and #5370)

Eternal High Score Overlord JP Calderone made a fair showing as well, finishing #5371 ("In the developer guide, forbid new global reactor unit tests"), and splitting #4671 ("sometimes I want to have some constant values that are part of a set") into more managable tickets:

• #5382: "Provide a library for valueless named constants"
• #5383: "Provide a library for simple valued named constants"
• #5384: "Provide a library for bitvector-like valued named constants"

Of which #5382 and #5383 saw immediate progress.

Returning Champion Sprinter Paul Swartz reviewed and otherwise worked on several tickets, including:

• #2997: "Conch and getPeer"
• #5352: "Do not register overlapping old DH key exchange messages"
• #1902: "Compatibility work-around for commercial SSH 2.0.12 misbehaviours"
• #3242: "Use python 2.5 'spwd' module instead of z3p secret 'shadow' module when available"

One-word Twisted celebrity Glyph was also on hand to assist with the reviews of #3242, #5382, and #1918

With considerably more words in his name, Itamar Turner-Trauring started porting a Nevow branch with IRI support (internationalized URLs) to Twisted as per ticket #5388, as well as helping resolve #3037 with Jessica.

Finally, Glyph, Itamar, and Dave Sturgis conferred on #288, and the related cluster of web-resource-model issues it involves; It is hoped that this will eventually result in a new Web Server URL Traversal API, or WSURLTA, not to be confused with the nordic kraken-headed demigod of lore.