Django-hosted aurweb Proposal

[Kevin Morris]

Thank you for the extra CC, that was perfect timing :).

To address Foxboron, I would choose Django as a framework purely so that we
could integrate it into the same wsgi engine that archweb uses on the
current servers and have it work seamlessly. But additionally, Django
provides a good baked in user model which we would otherwise have to either
implement or use an existing user framework for Flask/SQLAlchemy? I believe
that Django is more rigorous in it's approach to handling routes and would
require less developer effort to add, modify, or remove features. It is
heavier, but I believe that it is more stable when used correctly. Django
also provides many automatic handling of sessions (redirection to login,
automatic error responses, ...) and it's rest_framework extension is just
as simple and robust as anything else.

I'm a bit confused. You wrote one patch and you want to rewrite the whole
> thing
> now? I've seen this at least three times before with more or less fully
> developed rewrites. They all failed. They were all written in Python
> coincidentally.


No. The patch was merely something that I wanted to help resolve before
presenting any kind of proposal like this. It was brought up as an
outstanding issue or possible patch to finish up for the RPC protocol. I
only wanted to help finish the patch to help out (and I also thought
provides would be quite useful).

Additionally, I would like to apologize for the fact that the proposal is
not as well written as it could be.

On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 9:08 PM Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat 16 Feb 2019 17:21 -0800, Kevin Morris wrote:
> > The following is a proposal for a Django-hosted aurweb application. It is
> > meant to be a drop-in replacement for aur.archlinux.org; effectively
> > cloning its user interface and capabilities into a Python Django
> extension.
> >
> > Following https://patchwork.archlinux.org/patch/1000/, I would like to
> put
> > together a new aurweb.
>
> I'm a bit confused. You wrote one patch and you want to rewrite the whole
> thing
> now? I've seen this at least three times before with more or less fully
> developed rewrites. They all failed. They were all written in Python
> coincidentally.
>
> > The current revamped version of archweb runs inside of a django server
> as a
> > django extension (or app). I would like to do this same thing for
> `aurweb`.
> > The new django `aurweb` shall support all of the current v1-6
> capabilities
> > that aurweb provides, as well as the front-end user website located at
> > https://aur.archlinux.org.
>
> archweb was already written in python for django more than 10 yrs ago.
> I guess it may not have been an extension (or app), whatever that is.
> I imagine the porting/migration if any would have been much more trivial
> than
> a full rewrite.
>
> > It shall be an exact clone from the user's perspective.
>
> This is a very uncompelling reason to rewrite the whole thing.
>
> > The major differences between maintaining a PHP vs Django server would be
> > that the Django server would be:
>
> Users don't care about any of your six bullet points.
>
> > I would like to hear your thoughts on this. If approved, I would love to
> > begin this project within the next few weeks.
>
> Begin the project now and don't make it the same. Make it better.
> Nobody is gonna approve vaporware.
> Steal users from the AUR.
> Convince people your system really is better.
> Good luck.
>
>

-- 
Kevin Morris
Software Developer

Business Inquiries: kevr at coderesistance.com
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