[TIP] PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy: link to Selenium bindings for Python

[Michael Foord]

On 24 Aug 2011, at 02:24, Laura Creighton wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> I'm happy to spend some time cleaning this up, but I thought we should
>> discuss how this should be done. For example, what should happen to
>> stuff that appears to be unmaintained? A separate section at the
>> bottom somewhere, or just delete it? And do we really want links that
>> are just source code and nothing more?
> 
> I don't want things that appear to be unmaintained to be deleted.
> I'm pretty hostile to the notion that somehting needs to have
> active development in order to be useful, and I think that is
> what you would be detecting.  Some things may not have changed
> since 2004 because nothing needed changing since 2004 -- plugins
> in particular.

On the other hand code can and does rot. There are a couple of mocking frameworks for example (a topic dear to my heart) that haven't been maintained, and they don't even *import* in recent versions of Python. Typically because of the addition of "with" and "as" as keywords in the last few years.

It *is* useful to know whether a project is maintained or abandoned, even if you can still use the abandoned ones you may want someone to report bugs too and some hope that they may be fixed.

Having to weed through pages of dead projects doesn't make a directory more useful, and in fact quite the opposite...

> 
> Links to source code, even if that is all that is there, is useful for
> people who want to develop something and want to check how other
> people have already done it.  Sometimes an old project can get new
> maintainers this way, when somebody discovers that it is easier to
> work with something that already exists than to start all over from
> scratch.
> 
> But separating things out so that people can easily find
> the packages that are under development sounds reasonable.  It 
> would be very good, at this point, to also include a note about
> how stable the apis are.  Some projects are under _too_ active
> development for general use at this point, and people will
> be quite annoyed when they find that the apis and/or the 
> behaviour changes with every release.
> 

So yes, maybe a "historic record" section would be useful for the unmaintained projects. Knowing whether an api is *too* subject is hard to guage though - and very subjective. If a project hasn't had any commits or releases in five years, that at least is an objective fact. 


All the best, 

Michael

> Laura
> 
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Geoff
>> 
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