Dogfood the new class-based views in contrib.syndication?

[Stephen Burrows]

I was recently working with django's syndication framework, and noticed that it felt clunky in a lot of ways. For example, I can only access the request and the kwargs for the function during the get_object method; if I want to do anything more complicated with them - for example, say I want to limit the items returned based on a tag that's in a GET parameter - there's not much that I can do. (I've chosen to return a dictionary from get_object containing the actual object and any variables that I want to have passed around to all the different methods.)

It seems like this would be a great place to dogfood the new CBVs; they could bring a lot of elegance to the framework. (For example, the whole 'dynamic attribute' feature would be unnecessary.) This is obviously something that can be done as a third-party app first; I'm just curious whether this is something that (generally speaking) people would be interested in seeing. I tried checking the tracker and google for previous discussions about this, but didn't find anything.

--Stephen

[Russell Keith-Magee]

I can't speak to what others will find interesting. It certainly
sounds interesting to me, if only for the dogfooding aspect.

The biggest issue standing in the way of introducing a change like
this into the core will be backwards compatibility. There is plenty of
code out there using the existing syndication framework, and we've
only just recently completed a deprecation cycle around changes to the
syndication framework. This is probably the reason that you can't find
many tickets against the syndication framework at the moment; that
rewrite addressed most of the big problems with syndication at the
time. Unfortunately, that rewrite happened just before CBVs were
introduced.

However, that shouldn't stop you from looking at this project as a
standalone project. Worst case, you can always keep it as an external
app. However, once you've got some working code, we'll have a better
idea of how complex a migration task would be involved, and whether a
seamless migration to a dogfooded syndication framework is even
possible.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)