I’ve been actively maintaining a moderately popular third-party Django package for almost a decade now:
I’m asking on here if there’s any interest in potentially looking to submit a port of this as a DEP to mainline into Django. This would not be a copy/paste of django-distill, but a feature compatible rewrite removing a lot of legacy work-arounds from originally being written for Django 1.x and being third-party.
I imagine this would be a contrib module (e.g. staticsite) sort of addition.
Specifically, I’d like to have a chat with anyone open to giving some assistance from the Django side (a shepherd) and if there’s any interest in pursuing this.
I’ve no issue with keeping it third party, however it would likely be quite well used, a lot cleaner to implement as a mainline feature and it seems to fit in well with the existing bundled contrib modules so thought after a decade I’d at least ask.
I know @emma and @adamghill were discussing django-distill recently, so they’d be the people I’d talk to get initial support here.
Getting something substantial into Django is always tough. (Big conversation about it just today on the Fediverse…) This kind of thing fits exactly in the Could just as well be out of core as in it — but it would be a good feature to have, I agree. The challenge is always about keeping Django down to maintainable size. (How we do Kernal Django plus Packages better is unsolved.)
Short answer is, I don’t if it would be possible to merge, but talking with Emma and Adam would be my first port of call.
Thanks for all your efforts! A decade is a long time
I would definitely agree that, in the current context of “HTML first” (and my recent rant on upgrades), having a built-in, opt-in, solution for exporting a Django site to static would be a great battery to have!
I know we’ve broached the subject a couple times with @theorangeone as well, so, having recently gone through the DEP process, he might be able to give advice as well.
I would sure be keen on testing/contributing to a rewrite. Other than that, not being part of the decision process, I’m not sure what other help I can provide.
Ah, that’s an error, I think. Everybody here is part of the decision process, folks thinking that not just means their voice isn’t counted. (Make sense?)
Being involved and then saying, yes, having looked at it, +1 carries as much weight as anyone else’s voice. (Yes, there’s a steering council that’s sometimes needed, but even in those cases, the rest of the community’s voices influence the outcome.)
Gotcha. I’m not sure the shepherd role is still 100% well defined these days, but it basically comes down to asking the SC for a vote at the key moment. I can do that, or mentor someone else in doing that , if needed.
Thanks for the responses. Very happy to chat to others who’ve had more experience with contributing to Django as a first step.
I can see the argument about keeping Django a maintainable size. A rewrite of django-distill wouldn’t likely be particularly large or complicated though if it were considered. I was going to rewrite it shortly anyway so it seemed an opportune time to discuss if it might want to get added as an optional module. I don’t mind doing the required code and tests and opening a PR, but obviously the process to get something included in Django is … somewhat more complicated.
I’m assuming Discord is the place to chat to the people mentioned here directly? Or is there another preferred communication method? I’m on Discord already (same username) and #contributing-getting-started referred me to here.
, if needed.