Pylons' past philosophy always seemed to be "we'll take the best-in-breed of python web software and put it together in an elegant way." Sadly, they seem to have abandoned that philosophy for the sake of protecting the precious nest eggs of massive full-stack framework developers.
While the new changes to Pylons certainly don't prevent you from using the aforementioned exceptional-quality components, the smushing-together of projects while trying to retain legacy compatibility seems to have created an enormous system where there isn't a cohesive or consistent way of doing things.
No thanks--I think I'll go for WebOb and its lightweight performance.
Reminds me of this blogpost from a while back: http://www.hindsightlabs.com/blog/2010/03/15/jinja2-and-djan...
"In the beginning, there was Django, and it was good. But gradually we began to find its paradigms counterintuitive: we disliked the idea of apps and considered the built-in template language pretty crippled. More importantly, we prefer the epically powerful SQLAlchemy to Django’s ORM of Doom, so with the evidence before us, we switched to Pylons and the haven of SQLAlchemy/Jinja, only to discover we had switched from a shitty apartment in Brooklyn to a tent in the desert. No cockroaches, true, but no running water, either. Who really wants to write a thumbnail library? (Apologies to anyone who has actually written a thumbnail library)"
- No clear visual distinction between links to glossary terms and links to further documentation. I like the glossary, but always ended up there without wanting to.
- I did find the tutorials, no issue there. (Only that the paster templates are a bit awkwardly named, but that's not a doc issue.)
- Especially the former BFG stuff, I'm thinking specifically about traversal, is explained in a way that probably makes a ton of sense to Zopeheads, but, at the time anyway, read more like a PhD thesis than like documentation.
- Again not strictly a documentation issue, but the fact that you can configure and use Pyramid in a ton of different ways means there's no straight path from getting started to actually getting something up and running, even with the tutorials. Not being opinionated about anything simply makes it very difficult to write good, forceful docs.
Traversal explaining: we're working on it (really). The docs have been rearranged and massaged a good bit, and they're being futher (professionally) edited now.
Flexibility: the best I can do about that without betraying the goals of the project is http://docs.pylonshq.com/pyramid/dev/designdefense.html#pyra... . I'm also working on a cookbook here: https://github.com/Pylons/pyramid_cookbook which should provide the tl;dr'ers with a way to perform common tasks without needing to read didactic explanations.
The responsiveness of Chris and Ben to actually fixing this kind of thing is amazing, and one of the major reasons we thought teaming up with them would be a good idea.
There is a lot that can be said for consolidation. And a lot to be said for the team working on pyramid now, so I'm excited in spite of your skepticism.
I used to do development in Pylons and I've tried my hand at Pyramid, and there's simply nothing to get excited about. Even the documentation for Pyramid, which at first seems beautifully comprehensive and one of the system's strong points, turns out to be an interlinking mess lacking clear explanations of even the very basics of the system.
True enough, like Pylons before it, Pyramid is anything but opinionated, which probably makes it a good base platform for the TurboGears devs, but how much will it matter when people will just shrug their shoulders after looking at the landing page, and proceed to download Django or Flask/Werkzeug or, heck, Ruby on Rails?
Anyway, regardless of my scepticism, building new stuff and starting new projects is always fun, so hopefully the Pylons project devs enjoy the process.