Summer of Code 2007: Reusable Django applications

[Jannis Leidel]

As one result of my work during the Google summer of code 2007 I changed django.core.management a little and added a new django.utils.package with a metadata assistent and setuptools-based application creation. For more detail ping me on IRC (jezdez) or look at ​http://jannisleidel.com/ and ​http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/bc830d718957beb8

[Rob Hunter <robertjhunter@…>]

I love the concept. I'm not sure about the effect on tutorial-followers.

An instruction to run manage startapp polls makes enough sense to accept at the time, and understand later. Adding a {{--noskeleton}} is confusing, although being prompted for their name and what-have-you is probably confusing too.

[Jannis Leidel]

Yeah, unfortunately the whole "project" metaphor is quite misleading and was only introduced to make it easier for beginners to start. One effect of practice within the developer community is that most of them don't think that Django apps are also Python modules and can be used like it.

You are right, having to add --noskeleton to the tutorial is not logical - but my goal in the GSoC was to patch as little as possible of the current code base, so I dropped alternative ideas like introducing a whole new "package" command and other re-factoring possibilities. We need to tell the beginners what it means to have a distributable version of a Django application. I wonder how the usual way is to describe the use of e.g. django-tagging to a newbie?

One thing was also on my screen during the research for GSoC: setuptools and how it's used by Paste. Very nice and intuitive, but to complicated combine with Django, which implements very much itself than using an external library.

[Simon G. <dev@…>]

jezdez - can you raise this on django-dev?

[Jannis Leidel]

Sure, but do you mean this specific ticket or the general topic of best practices, setuptools and tutorials?

[Jannis Leidel]

changed the order of the subcommands and options in the docs, following a backwards incompatible change from #6075 (​http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/BackwardsIncompatibleChanges#django-admin.pyandmanage.pynowrequiresubcommandstoprecedeoptions)

[Jacob]

This is a lot bigger than a ticket. Since there isn't exactly a "next action" on this ticket, I'm going to mark it invalid while we discuss the bigger issues on django-dev.