In the August 6th Django Weekly Roundup written by Clint Ecker a comment was posted by “Mac” that expresses concern over the strength and dynamics of Django development. Now “Mac” is likely just a troll, but let us say for a moment that “Mac” has a legitimate concern. “Mac” suggests that because the Django Weekly Roundups tend to be more about what’s going on in the Django Community (outside) than the core Django development itself (inside), that somehow that is indicative of a lack of core development interest. The opposite is actually true. Let me explain.
The reason the Django Weekly Roundups are largely about the community is because the community is heavily invested in building an eco-system around the Django Framework. This, in itself, is indicative of a growing, healthy open source project. In fact, if the Weekly Django Roundups contained a heavy amount of material about core development, but little expression of community creations, this would suggest that there are a bunch of people developing a product that no one cares about. Clearly that is not the case here.
To continue on the theme of looking at the strength of the community, I am consistently amazed by the daily support provided on the #django IRC channel. Every day there are consistently 300+ individuals monitoring and using that channel. But it is more than a numbers game. The people on there are nice and helpful. There is a core group of “regulars” that spend hours each and every day helping others get the most out of the framework, and assisting them or pointing them in the right direction to get past a difficult problem. Among the regular answerers there seems to be an unspoken competition to see who can answer the problem most quickly. (Although no one can beat Magus at that game.) It is truly an “iron sharpens iron” environment, and a great place to come up to speed quickly.
There’s also the Django Discussion Lists on Google Groups. The Django Users group has over 6000 members and the Django Developers group has close to 2500 members. Monthly there are about 2500 posts on average, and what Google Groups classifies as “high” volume. Again these things point to a vibrant community. A vibrant community indicates a successful open source software project.
So is development really stalling? Quite the contrary. As Adrian Holovaty, core Django developer, suggest, “Check out the Trac changelog if you have any doubts about the project’s health.” I took a look at the commit logs and discovered that in the last 90 days we’ve seen 660 commits. That’s a lot of activity! Sure, some of these are commits are small changes, but some of them are huge changes, like the merge of Unicode support. Along with the actual commits, there is a tremendous amount of work being put into the newforms Admin rewrite, SQL Server support, Migration Support, and several Google Summer of Code Projects. To truly appreciate some of the progress over the past two years consider some of these highlights pointed out by Adrian Holovaty. It’s quite an accomplishment.
One of “Mac’s” other concerns was the fact that there appears to be a lack of updates on the Django Book. This same concern has been expressed on IRC and in the Google Groups. I will not attempt to speak for the authors or publisher of the book, but I do know that writing, editing, and publishing a book is a lot of work and takes a long time. Clearly the community is hungry for more information about Django. And once again this is an indicator that the community is strong and growing. There are individuals working on books, training, blogs, and videos, but all of these things take time to produce. We also have a project that is moving at a very fast pace and is not yet in a place where the core developers are ready to declare Version 1.0 status and the stability that goes along with it. For this reason some contributions may be held back for some time.
I hope “Mac” is just someone with true concerns for a project that he is passionate about. And hopefully “Mac”, and anyone else out there with these concerns, will take a moment to reflect on all of the hard work and dedication being put in Django on daily basis, by its core developers and the community at large. I know that I’m sincerely appreciative.
Personally, I consider a sign of the strength of a project when it attracts an “X is dying” troll. And his comments are meaningless, anyway, because Netcraft hasn’t confirmed it yet ;)