Heads up: Genshi will be abandoned and become obsolete

[Luke Macken]

----- "Stephen John Smoogen" <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Luke Macken <lmacken at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> > The future of Genshi is currently in question...
> >
> >  
>  http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears-trunk/t/ec921035779324e9
> >
> > We currently rely on the Genshi templating engine for:
> >
> >   * all static fedoraproject.org sites are compiled down to HTML
> from Genshi
> >   * Elections
> >   * FAS
> >   * PackageDB
> >   * Smolt
> >   * Trac (which will be switching to Jinja2 in the next release)
> >
> > It's also worth noting that Bodhi & Mirrormanager still rely on Kid,
> the unmaintained precursor to Genshi.
> >
> > Quoting upstream:
> >
> > """
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> > """
> >
> > So, what are our options?
> >
> >  1) Find contributors that are willing and able to help sustain this
> project upstream
> >  2) Stay on Genshi and rely on the Fedora/EPEL maintainers to fix
> bugs as they are filed
> >  3) Try and utilize http://pypi.python.org/pypi/chameleon.genshi
> instead, which is supposed to be able to run Genshi templates faster
> than Genshi can.
> >     (Note: TG2 was going to support this engine, but apparently it
> needs a bit more work.  It may still be worth looking into, though.)
> >  4) Port to another templating engine (Jinja2, Mako, etc)
> >
> > We obviously have a vested interest in keeping this project alive,
> so #1 is ideal.
> >
> > Porting will require a bit of effort.  The TurboGears2 port of bodhi
> that I'm working on will use the Mako templating engine (which is
> actively maintained by the SQLAlchemy author).  However, it seems
> we've taken the #2 route with Kid for the past 5 years, and I've had
> zero issues with it.
> >
> > There was talk at PyCon this year about changing the TurboGears2
> default templating engine to Mako.  The only reason not to for 2.0 was
> to ease the 1.0->2.0 transition.  However, everyone I spoke to was in
> favor of switching the defaults in 2.1.
> 
> Looking at the options and other parts.. I think staying with Genshi
> for the most part would be our 'best' bet. If someone is really
> motivated or if we are doing a huge code change in something then
> maybe it would be attractive for changing.

Yeah, I agree.  This issue has caused a lot of discussion today, and there are definitely a lot of people out there that care about Genshi 
and some have even stepped up and are willing to help support & maintain it.  I also see some milestone activity on my upstream tickets happening today.
So, Genshi is definitely not dead -- it just needed a swift kick in the ass :)

luke