Bits and pieces.
This week was the second of Daniele Procida’s workshops on contributing to the Django docs, and his Diátaxis framework for documentation. I wrote about this last week.
Again, just super.
With DjangoCon out of the way, time to turn to the summer projects. The first of those is Django Girls.
First call there is that the website needs ongoing maintenance. My task this week was to get set up, run the tests and so on, and get familiar.
All good. The usual nonsense with outdated dependencies, which hits me harder when there’snode issues involved: is this my environment, or the project’s that’s at fault? Anna Makarudze (DSF President) is doing a good job already updating things, so my first challenge is catching up with her.
Since the releases at the beginning of the year, I’ve not had much time for Channels. That’s fine, but time for another pass.
First up is a new Redis PubSub based channel layer. This is very exciting.
The existing channel layer is OK, but it’s struggled with client disconnects, and there have been a long line of impossible to diagnose small issues around this.
Ryan Henning has come on board and added a PubSub based implementation that looks a lot more stable in preliminary testing.
This is in the main branch now. We’re going to release it as a beta version in the next week. Please give it a run, and feedback.
It’s a lot less code. It offloads a lot of the responsibility to Redis. I’m quite optimistic.
If all goes well, we’ll promote it to final and then think about whether we deprecate the existing layer.
We’ll also have Redis sentinel support in the next release (for both the channel layers) — so it’s good work from the community.
Following that, will be updates for Channels and Daphne too.
If you’re using Channels, remember to be involved: we want to keep the core simple and maintainable, but at this stage sharing knowledge is probably the most important thing. What are issues? How do we get round them? That’s invaluable, and it’s been missing at times.