Volunteers needed for Twisted project jobs

The Twisted project is a lot more than just writing code. Volunteers help sustain Twisted by reviewing tickets, writing documentation, answering questions on IRC, the mailing lists, and Stack Overflow, donating build servers, managing releases, packaging Twisted for distributions, sponsoring development, and more.

To everyone who contributes to the Twisted project in some way, thank you!

Twisted project jobs

A small group of dedicated Twisted developers have been doing maintenance work over the years that we'd like to start distributing across more of the community. These tasks include:

• maintaining Buildbot buildslaves
• maintaining the Twisted Speed Center
• maintaining our Trac instance
• maintaining version control mirrors

We've broken these tasks into bite-sized chunks, and you can find descriptions for them on the Project Jobs wiki page. Take a look, and please claim a task and how long you're up for doing it on the mailing list. If you have questions about any of them, don't hesitate to ask on the mailing list or IRC. You'll have lots of help getting set up.

Twisted Matrix Labs high scores

Are you competitive? Need a little extra incentive to contribute? I challenge you to get to the top of the monthly Twisted Matrix Labs high scores list:

Ticket openers, reviewers, and closers all get varying amounts of points. Note that a review banks you 1000 points, the most for a single ticket action, and we have a long review queue, so brush up on our patch review guidelines and dig in.

May Sprint Report

Greetings audience.  Another month has gone by, and that means another excellent Twisted sprint is behind us.  A couple weekends ago Dave, Ying, Itamar, Glyph, Asheesh, and myself gathered at the now traditional sprinting location.  Quite a few things were worked on.  Amongst the highlights were the following tickets:

#4813 - provide permissions accessor for filepath
#5053 - Add Gzip support to web client
#5088 - cfreactor cannot be imported
#5063 - When TLS transport is in writeBlockedOnRead=True mode, data is buffered in memory but producer APIs are not respected
#5095 - twisted.protocols.tls should flush all of the bio data, rather than just 2**15 bytes

Evennia: Event-Driven Online Gaming with Twisted and Django

Do you have a hankering to run your own multi-user text-based game server? If you do, and you love Twisted, Evennia is the project for you! Through the power of Twisted, Evennia has built a MUD-server platform that not only provides traditional telnet access but also lets you play via the web! As Evennia maintainer Griatch Art put it:

Whereas traditional MUD servers only speak telnet, Evennia additionally comes with its own browser-based client and allows for expanding with custom game protocols in any combination. ... All of this is straightforward to implement and maintain thanks to Twisted!

Evennia also combines Twisted with Django, providing a comprehensive real-world case study of melding these two popular systems.  As Griatch puts it, Twisted and Django "work beautifully together".

To find out more about how Twisted was the perfect fit for this massively multi-player platform and why the Evennia team chose Twisted, check out the success story.

Have your own success story using Twisted? Let us know! Just send an e-mail to success@twistedmatrix.com

Twisted 11.0.0 released!

<lvh> PAS MAINTENANT CHEF! CHUIS EN TRAIN DE BRANCHER LE REACTEURRRRR

On behalf of Twisted Matrix Laboratories, I am honored to announce the release of Twisted 11.0.0.

Highlights include:

• a new templating system in Twisted Web, "twisted.web.template", derived from Divmod Nevow.
• improved behavior of subprocess spawning on FreeBSD.
• the 'twistd mail' plugin now uses the endpoints API, providing a more consistent command line and compatibility with endpoint plugins.
• twisted.plugin no longer emits a confusing traceback when it can't write a cache file.

and numerous other bugfixes and documentation improvements. For more information, see the NEWS file.

Download it now from:

<http://twistedmatrix.com/>

or install the 'Twisted' package from PyPI.

Many thanks to Glyph Lefkowitz and Jean-Paul Calderone for sanity-checking the pre-releases and release, and to the enthusiastic PyCon 2011 sprinters who annihilated dozens of tickets. Thanks to *everyone* who contributed tickets, patches, documentation, reviews, buildbots, feedback, and assistance to fellow users and developers leading up to this release. It is truly a group effort.

<http://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/?time=2011-03-01>

is a testament to how much work was done in March alone.

March (post PyCon) Twisted Sprint Report

We held a small but productive and successful Twisted sprint, kindly hosted once again by tenth, and attended by glyph, exarkun, jesstess and lewq.

The aim of the sprint was to do the first pre-release of Twisted 11.0 - and we managed to resolve almost all of the blocking tickets, so a partial success. :-)

One of the two main themes of the work was the twisted.web templating code, which got tidied up and properly documented - there's a new tutorial (temporarily available at http://buildbot.twistedmatrix.com/builds/sphinx-html/291-15849/projects/web/howto/twisted-templates.html), which demonstrates this neat little templating engine in action. The other theme was completing and merging the file descriptor closing branch which exarkun and lewq worked on, bringing FreeBSD just a few test-fixes away from being a fully supported platform - and importantly stopped the FreeBSD builder hanging on testing trunk, which will help catch regressions.

The following tickets got closed:

#4968 - Resource templating documentation has broken link to twisted.web.server.Resource which emphatically does not exist
#4881 - twisted.internet.process._listOpenFDs fails on FreeBSD because fdescfs isn't mounted by default
#4732 - Document @withRequest XML-RPC feature in the XML-RPC howto

And the following tickets got worked on:

#4854 - Replace the implementation of IReactorSSL with one based on twisted.protocols.tls
#3690 - SerialPort never calls connectionLost(reason)
#4969 - Add CONNECT support to HTTP client
#4951 - links in twisted.web docs are broken

That's it until next time, enjoy Twisted 11.0 when it comes out! We still have the PyCon sprint to report on, watch for that soon.

Twisted 11.0.0pre1 released -- please test

Intrepid Twisted developers and users: from Cambridge, Massachusetts I am pleased to announce the arrival of Twisted 11.0.0 pre-release 1.

Please download the pre-release tarballs and test away!

Highlights include:

• a new templating system in Twisted Web, "twisted.web.template", derived from Divmod Nevow.
• improved behavior of subprocess spawning on FreeBSD.
• the 'twistd mail' plugin now uses the endpoints API, providing a more consistent command line and compatibility with endpoint plugins.
• twisted.plugin no longer emits a confusing traceback when it can't write a cache file.

For more information, see the NEWS file.

Super Late February Twisted Sprint Report

Good news everyone,

Last month, Twisted held another very successful sprint.  A late write-up is better than no write-up, so here's what went on.

In attendance were Glyph, Tenth, Itamar, Mike Handverger, Luke, and myself (Jean-Paul).  Remotely, Jonathan J. and Stephen Thorne helped out.  Quite a few tickets were worked on, and various reviews were done as well.  Here's a list (bold indicates now closed):

#2036 - trial runs tests from .pyc files even if there is no .py file
#3834 - TCP client howto missing reactor.run() in one code sample#3844 - Parse IRC format codes
#3948 - wxdemo.py does not exit
#4008 - Most examples in documentation do not log messages and errors
#4520 - pb.CopiedFailure.throwExceptionIntoGenerator breaks in Python 2.6.
#4817 - IPv4Address and UNIXAddress not-equal comparison is broken
#4823 - Clock should re-sort pending calls when one of them is reset
#4836 - Make _getFunction method public in t.w.xmlrpc.XMLRPC
#4864 - Improve lore2sphinx buildbot results for `projects/core/howto/logging.xhtml`
 #4865 - Improve lore2sphinx buildbot results for `projects/core/howto/quotes.xhtml`

As I'm writing up this report at the March Twisted Sprint, look forward to another one of these real soon now. :)