On Cerebro, Telepathy, yokes and whites (was Re: cerebro in sugar)

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 7:51 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 7:05 PM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
> <ypod at mit.edu> wrote:
> * The abstraction layer needs to be accessible to non-python
> activities. Unless you want to expose it through DBus, you will have
> to write it in C (with python bindings). And if I'm not mistake
> Cerebro is written in python.

So expose it through DBus.  This is done already, if I understand correctly.

> * I haven't seen any concrete technical argument against telepathy *API* so far.

I've got a concrete non-technical objection: kids at gamejams
invariably want to write a multiplayer game.  Almost none succeed.
This tells me we need a better collaboration API.

You can argue that this "simple" API should be *on top* of the
lower-level telepathy (or cerebro) API, and I won't argue.  But we
need *something* which a 12-year old can use.

> If you think telepathy API is irremediably broken, I suggest you focus
> on coming up with an alternative which meets all the requirements
> (included working for non python activities) and at the same time it's
> technically superior to the telepathy one (enough to be worth an API
> break of these dimensions).

My personal metric revolves around tutorials: can you write a simple
and straightforward guide to using your API?  I haven't seen such a
thing yet for telepathy or cerebro; the first one to come up with such
a thing would score points in my personal metric (not the only one
which counts, of course).
  http://www.pygame.org/wiki/tutorials
  http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/   <-- for big kids
 --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )