On 07.04.2010, at 12:36, Christian Boos wrote: > On 3/23/2010 12:43 AM, Greg Troxel wrote: >> Speaking as someone using trac seriously, it seems scary to be talking >> about a 0.12 release that depends on unreleased versions of other tools. > > I understand and share your concerns. > >> If that's really the case, then I'd say the other tools need to be >> encouraged/helped to get to release or forked and released before 0.12 >> has an rc. > > We have considered that. It looks like we're going to have a Babel 0.9.5 > really soon (I see the packages on ftp.edgewall.org as I'm writing this), and > perhaps a Genshi 0.6 release at some later point (keep finger crossed).
The Babel maintenance release has made it out of the door today. I will do my best to get Genshi 0.6 out by next week. To be honest, I'm not sure what's going to happen after that, and you're certainly right to be pessimistic. I'm really sorry about how the situation has turned out for Trac. Yes, my interests have mostly shifted elsewhere. I still believe that both Babel and Genshi are worth being further maintained and enhanced, and I'm still interested to actually do the work, but obviously I'm not able to allot anywhere enough spare time to that task right now. What's more, I've unforunately been unable to attract other developers to contribute significantly to either code base, let alone build a strong community. That's not to say that I consider either project end-of-life. I still use them for my own stuff. But I'm the pretty much the single point of failure for both projects, and I've been failing badly and consistently at maintaining/enhancing them for some time now. Sorry. > The fact remains that those libraries are currently strong dependencies for > Trac (Genshi even more so than Babel), and neither has currently the level of > maintenance we were used to have, every sign indicates this trend won't > change. I've also stopped to hope there will be any drastic performance > improvement, and while there has been some improvements last year (1), I > rather feel that this means that all that could be realistically done has now > been done on this topic. Of course, theoretically someone could step up > anytime and bring in a radically new idea and dramatically increase > performance, but that's precisely what I've been hoping for since the last 4 > years. While there has been such attempts, made by bright minds, none really > succeeded. > > So don't get me wrong, I actually like Genshi, I was really pleased to ditch > the ugly and hard to maintain Clearsilver templates and enthusiastically > converted most of the Trac templates to it. I also helped to fix (easy) > Genshi issues during the early stage of its development, but was always > intimidated by its complexity. I still enjoy very much *using* Genshi from a > developer perspective, but for the reasons exposed above, from the point of > view of Trac maintenance and its future evolution, we really have a situation > to address, lots of users are still hesitant to move away from Trac *0.10* > because of performance concerns (Genshi is perhaps not the only factor at > play there, but it's an important one). > > It seems however that there could be a way forward, by considering once again > a switch of the templating engine. This time it would be in favor of Jinja2 > (2), which seems to have a great momentum and have the adequate capabilities > and speed we need. In addition, its main developer is also a long time Trac > supporter and has shown interest in supporting us for the switch (hello > Armin!). > > There has been some informal discussions on this topic on the #trac IRC > channel, so the logical next step is to discuss it more formally here on > Trac-dev. To me at least, the status quo is not really an option. I'm aware > this will cause some inconvenience, especially for the plugins that currently > depend on stream filters. However this will be mitigated by the fact that we > can continue to support Genshi, and migrate to Jinja2 only gradually, > starting with the time critical parts (like the changeset view, the browser > view and the timeline). I agree that adoption of Jinja2 should be considered, it's become a very solid templating solution, and comes with both more momentum and better performance than Genshi. But I'm not sure how a gradual transition could work. As Noah said, you can't switch some of the most important pages to Jinja and still support stream filters. Or site templates using match templates for advanced customization. You'll also need to rethink parts of the internationalization story, I guess. If there's going to be another template engine switch, I think it's going to hurt. But it might just be worth it. Cheers, -- Christopher Lenz cmlenz at gmx.de http://www.cmlenz.net/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Trac Development" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/trac-dev?hl=en.
