When different parties do implement similar things they are never really the same anyway, as each will incorporate different ideas as to how to go about solving the problem. This is important and any decent programmer would look at what other people are doing in the Python community and learn from others successes, as well as their failures. It is only through this cross fertilisation of ideas and learning from others that as a whole the quality and utility of code will move forward.

The other thing with competing solutions is that they usually have different trade offs, and as such, which one is better for a particular scenario will depend on the sort of application or environment it is used in. No one solution will always be the best at everything.

As such I feel that trying to suppress people from doing their own thing and trying to make them use a specific package is in the end run counter productive. If a solution is not good it will die its own death. If it is a good solution and for good reason, it could well become so successful as to replace all other existing solutions, even if only for a time.

So, empires will come and go, this will never change and we shouldn’t try and stop it.

However I missed for some time that you started a very similar thing namely webob and tempita. I guess if those projects would have existed for a little longer some parts of werkzeug would probably not exist as such.

One of the reasons why I never really felt that happy with paste was that it brings a lot of stuff I personally don’t want to use and lacks things I need every day. There are exceptions for every status code, how many of those do you actually use? There are request objects but the file handling feels a lot like the cgi module thanks to the FieldStorage. Long time ago I had big problems with unicode because paste was lacking unicode support everywhere. Paste comes with interesting stuff but most of them I don’t use (like paste deploy, SCGI, paste config, transactions) which make 20.000 lines of code and lack things I would actually use (like URL routing, the Werkzeug debugger [yes, there is evalexception, however my sense for aesthetics and usability prefers the Werkzeug one, sorry for that], a simple way to generate custom management scripts without installing PasteScript).

At the end of the day Werkzeug is a very small library bundling everything you need to bootstrap your own WSGI application in no time and I’m very happy with the feature/lines of code ratio. And even if I was the only person using Werkzeug the work of the last half year was worth the effort. And unlike Colubrid it’s predecessor you can mix it with any other library out there which makes it a good addition to existing libraries.

Hope I could defend my POV :-)

Regards,
Armin

For instance:

request/response: paste.wsgiwrappers, and now webob
file uploads: well, the cgi module automatically does that
static files: paste.fileapp and paste.urlparser.StaticURLParser
wsgiref wrapper: paste.httpserver and paster serve
unicode: paste.wsgiwrappers/webob
mini template engine: tempita
context locals: paste.registry
test utilities: paste.fixture.TestApp and now webtest
interactive debugger: paste.evalexception and now weberror

I don’t particularly mind this duplication, but I’m confused by it. Why reimplement everything? (And you aren’t even the only one, Luke Arno’s libraries have the same pattern of reimplementation.)

Regards,
Armin