Comment by zain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zain | Hacker News Reader

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Wow. In summary, he switched from Django to Pylons because:

  - He couldn't figure out how to modify his Pinax project
  - He couldn't get django-openid to work
  - There's no debugger on Django exception pages
  - Something about magic imports?

You don't have to fork Pinax to add/remove apps to it. You don't have to fork django-openid to use it in your project, just override the templates. Recaptcha fits into the app model very easily: it's just another auth backend. You can get a debugger on your exception pages by installing django-extensions.

As a Django developer myself, I totally agree with some of his frustrations. For example one very common problem I run into with Django is that a typo in a urls.py file will manifest itself as a URL reversal problem with the first attempt at URL reversal. The error always point to the same file and it's never the file with the problem, or even the same type of file. Not helpful.

While I agree that the problems could have been worked out with more knowledge of the framework, it doesn't help to gloss over the issues. For almost all of the problems he mentioned, Django's got a lot of room for improvement and especially those who love it should admit that.

It should be possible to add a pdb.set_trace() or ipdb.set_trace() to the part of Django that traverses the URL tree. Then it should be possible to watch every URL be evaluated until one matches your request.

Don't ask me where it is, but, if you find it, it's worthy of a blog post ;-)

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