On Apr 4, 2012, at 4:19 PM, Henry Robinson wrote: >> My work is available here: >> https://github.com/duncf/zkpython >> >> Before I open a JIRA ticket with a patch, I was hoping to get some >> consensus around the API and get some understanding around the following >> points: >> >> - How important is backwards compatibility for things like zkpython >> between versions? >> > > Unfortunately I think it's quite important to maintain for the 3.x series > of ZK. That said, if there's a way we can keep both APIs around there's no > problem adding your improved API to the original one (as long as everyone > agrees it's the right direction for the API to go) - that'll help with the > transition. How feasible do you think that might be? I haven't read your > patch series yet, so I don't know how much of the guts has been rewritten, > but it looks as though zookeeper.c survived fairly intact so perhaps both > APIs can coexist.
It should be fairly trivial to maintain backwards compatibility (just need to add a "from _zookeeper import *" or something equivalent). Knowing that we need to maintain backwards compatibility also puts on a certain amount of pressure to get it right. ;-) >> >> - Do we need support for asynchronous methods before considering changes >> for inclusion in ZooKeeper source? (Would anybody like to help?) >> > > I think async support is required if this ever gets into a release and the > old API doesn't, otherwise that's a functionality regression I'd like to > avoid. Understood. I've been brainstorming some ideas on how best to implement the async functionality. One of the difficulties (in my mind, at least) with the async API is that there are too many different types of callbacks, and remembering the callback arguments and their order. I've been thinking about making the callbacks in zkpython take an "Event" object which would have the appropriate attributes set. This means you could share callbacks for different types of calls. (You could potentially also share code between watchers and callbacks, but I'm not sure if that's desirable.) I'm still pretty new to ZooKeeper, so I'm not sure about all the use cases; I'd love to hear some feedback on this. Thanks Duncan
