NWSGI 2.0 Beta 2 Released

NWSGI 2.0 Beta 2 is now available. This release in linked against IronPython 2.6 Beta 2, and also fixes a couple of bugs. The big change is that the install does not add NWSGI to the GAC; without IronPython also installed to the GAC, it doesn't make much sense to put NWSGI there.

Biting Off More Than I Can Chew

I was going through the “Repositories” folder on my machine, looking at all of the stuff I’ve downloaded since, well, the last time I went through this exercise. This time around, a lot of it is stuff I’ve tried to get working on IronPython. Here’s a sampling:

• Django
• setuptools
• Trac
• Genshi
• Mercurial
• SCons
• CherryPy
• docutils
• moin
• pygments
• pymarkdown
• nose
• sqlalchemy
• IronRubyMVC

On top of that, there’s the stuff I wrote: NWSGI, IronPython.Zlib, adonet-dbapi, and more.

Unfortunately, I just don’t have time to track all (or even some) of those any more. Debugging things is also pretty difficult – IronPython is getting good enough that the only bugs are really obscure. It probably takes me ten times longer to find a bug and isolate it into a testcase than it does for Dino to fix it. There are other things in real life that have changed as well, drastically reducing the time I can spend on this stuff.

Somewhere along the line I developed a weird sense of duty to make that list of stuff work on IronPython, even though I didn’t have a use for most of it. Realistically, getting all of that to work, and finding all of the little corner cases of Python that they exploit but IronPython doesn’t implement, would be a full time job.

So, I’m cutting back. Way back. IronPython-wise, I’m only going to focus on the stuff I’ve written (and yes, I will be getting Beta 2 of NWSGI 2.0 out soon), and Iron[Ruby|Python]MVC . For me, those are going to be the most immediately rewarding, and I can also stop worrying about the others.

Now, with all of that said, I have an offer: if anyone wants to work on the top part of that list (up to and including SCons), I’ll help get you up to speed on some of the issues with those programs, and some of the tricks involved in debugging them (hint: Debugger.Break). This will be  limited-time offer, valid until I forget the details of the program in question. I really want to see these things compatible with IronPython, but I just no longer have the time to do it myself.