Django core no more
b-list.org
b-list.org
It's also an interesting mini history of the governance of the project and formation of things like the DSF.
Essentially they plan to dissolve the Django Core and make the development of Django more open to new contributors.
I and other DSF/Django members will likely be around here to answer any questions anyone may have.
My biggest hope is that this isn’t seen as scary or concerning to anyone. It should not be scary to any current users or contributors to Django.
This may be the wrong response, but my takeaway is that the project is too far along for new contributors, so it's better to try and get involved with smaller, less well known projects where I can contribute.
In part, I'm commenting because I would love for this to not be true, and would be quite excited if someone pointed out flaws in my understanding!
I also imagine that reaching committers through irc will bring some ideas to work on.
[0] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing...
It would be cool to see lists of how you can triage (e.g. encouraging people to help reproduce) or add tests (e.g. areas that could use more tests).
When I started a new job earlier this year I actually jumped at the chance to grab some documentation tickets, because it meant I had to not just halfheartedly skim through the relevant code but actually read it in detail and understand what was going on.
(and, of course, I ended up finding a bug)
https://trac.edgewall.org/query?status=new&keywords=~bitesiz...
'bitesized' tickets are "small work items, ideal for new contributors to dive into the code".
No progress was made on GenericTrac [1] whatsoever for the 5+ years I ran Trac in production and followed the project. Bloodhound made a single release, and then I never heard a word about it again.
GenericTrac was mainly a plan by Christian Boos, who worked a lot on Trac in ~2005 - 2013, but has not actively worked on it much after that.
Apache Bloodhound was mainly triggered by one company (WANdisco), which has lost interest in it. Of the few remaining people, Ryan J Ollos has since become a Trac core developer instead, and has been keeping very active there.
Recently Gary Martin (formerly(?) WANdisco) "restarted" Apache Bloodhound as a Django app, not based on Trac anymore.[2]
> Trac has many serious shortcomings
I don't disagree, but would be interested in what you think they are.
[2] https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@bloodhound.apache.org...
> It seems not that many people have enough time and long-term interest in contributing significant improvements to such projects.
I am not convinced that is the only reason. The trac mailing list was (in my opinion) hostile to people that showed up with an idea and willingness to work on it; nobody would give encouragement or guidance and there was usually a "fk off and fork" or two in there. People aren't going to stick around to contribute if the maintainers/community are not interested to include them. That is/was a serious shortcoming.
The data model was not well thought out, with lots of UNION and UNION ALL in the queries, row-modelling things that should be normalized, and so on. That's probably my #1 technical issue, in terms of the code, it was hard to correctly add functionality because things were just read into RAM and manipulated there (expert SQL knowledge is of no use when working with the trac database)
The switch of templating engine did not make the codebase simpler, but instead made everything more convoluted and difficult to work with.
The primary issue though, was the lack of Milestone customization, and the incredibly poor performance. I had to implement custom search, custom indexes, custom reports, and custom everything else. And this was a 5-person team, using only ticketing (no repo, no wiki, nothing).
The data model has not changed much, so that criticism is still relevant.
The templating engine has been switched again (ClearSilver -> Genshi -> Jinja). I don't know if you refer to the first or the second switch. I also don't know if this was an improvement or just even more churn.
Lack of Milestone customization: I'm not sure I understand.
Poor performance: How many tickets do you have?
Glad to hear that! Running an open project is hard.
> [...] switched again (ClearSilver -> Genshi -> Jinja)
Genshi was current when I used it; I wasn't aware it had switched to jinja (or it slipped my mind by now..)
> Lack of Milestone customization: I'm not sure I understand.
Back then, there were no custom fields for milestones, and the code didn't make it easy to do. Of course, this means you need changes to search facilities, and any other parts of the codebase. I had to write that also, and the target workflow was not at all complex.
As for the performance, we had about 20k tickets and 2k milestones when the system was replaced. By then it had been completely unusable for a long time.
Honestly, the only positives I have to say about Trac concern real-world usage by a hacker. Once you've learned it, and hacked it to your liking, it's very productive. But to get to that point, it's a sixty feet tall stack of ugly hacks, and frankly I would not recommend it to anyone...
Again to be clear, I did not look at the trac repo in many years, nor do I intend to.
I see. Milestones still have no custom fields. Did you ever send your customizations upstream?
Very hard to find the time to upstream something like that when you are on a limited budget in the first place..
Did anybody else feel inspired by a 'rapid web development' platform in 2005? https://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/08/02/0051258/django-pyth...
Consider that if a Django user wants to contribute with an account they're already logged into, the only thing they can see is https://github.com/django/django/pulls - a wall of structure and external references, with no clear way to suggest features. To the community's credit, people gently redirect "stray" pull requests to the proper channels, but this still has to feel like a form of rejection to well-meaning developers!
Compare this to https://github.com/facebook/react/issues and https://github.com/rails/rails/issues - inviting colors, a clear way to raise issues one click away from the codebase itself, centralized discussion of those issues, automatic links between PRs and issues. Nobody is left behind; any suggestion can become a discussion with decision-makers in place. This is what the modern developer has come to expect.
I love Django as a framework - it's a set of abstractions that make a ton of sense together, but simultaneously are much more explicit and easier to dive into than Rails. I can command-click my way through the entire stack in VS Code and know exactly what's going on; when there's a customization to make, there's almost always two or three hooks I can use to make it happen. And it pains me that there seems to be a fear of change and a fragmentation of contributor tooling that's holding it back from evolving. I don't know that Trac -> Github is the best path, but I hope that this is the first of numerous innovations that the core and board intend to discuss earnestly over the coming years.
EDIT: As I consider what I've written above, I'm thinking about a concept of TTFK - "Time To First Keystroke" that's intended as part of a contribution. Once you start writing an issue or coding a PR, assuming there's a clear path for it to get accepted, that first keypress is the start of an avalanche that gets obsessed developers deeper and deeper engaged. But if you look at the README on https://github.com/django/django , count how many clicks it takes, and words to read, and new platforms to join, until you can type your first character on a non-documentation feature request. It's not a fun number. Process/triage is great, but you have to have a way that someone's unstructured contribution can gain structure over time without requiring them to retype it or jump through hoops.
Django does need a place to store the tickets, and GitHub's tracker... is not great. I'd honestly want to look at adding OAuth or other easier signup/account management to Trac before I'd look at moving to GitHub issues.
Bots that mirror content/comments between the various platforms might be an interesting interim step that could minimize those scare quotes, and achieve many of the benefits in a minimally invasive way.
I'm of the opinion that Trac is probably blocking a number of people from contributing, even if that contribution is participating in comments and voting on issues.
But that's exactly the kind of thing the community as a whole can be empowered to do without the old guard of core vetoing the suggestion outright. The python community are considering doing just that now with PEP 581.
[0]https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/ai... [1]https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0581/
The funny thing is that I read this post yesterday and thought about contributing to Django... and they lost me when I saw “mailing list” somewhere in there.
it's very easy to write an email and there are some benefits to it. I.e, you don't need an account on a proprietary (Microsoft owned) system.
If Microsoft is an issue there are self-hosted options available like GitLab.
(I know Python is experimenting with a forum-based solution, but I worry about the burden of both yet another account to create and site to check, and finding people to maintain and moderate it)
Then once a PR is developed the discussion happens in PR comments.
The mailing list isn’t used for commenting on patches like some other projects.
Its so retarded to me that companies don't have a model for paying the open source projects they built their whole infrastructure on :(
But it's worth noting Instagram has been a generous corporate sponsor of the DSF, and hired a Django committer several years ago. I just don't know of any company that currently has employees paid to work on Django, in the same way that, say, several big tech companies pay people to work on various parts of the Linux ecosystem.