some upcoming skunkweb changes

Hi all --

I'm planning some changes to skunkweb which I'd like to run by you.

First of all, there is some new stuff in subversion now -- a "layout"
service which provides <:slot:> and <:calltemplate:> tags.  They make
it easier to define layout templates; I've been using them for a while
and just migrated them into skunk svn.  I also wrote a very simple
wsgi handler on my train ride the other day and checked it in, as a
preliminary gesture to more full wsgi support.

For a while I've felt that there were fairly major changes I wanted to
make, but it was too much for me to do given my schedule.  But now I
think I have a way of making more incremental changes that will be
more manageable.  So here is my plan:

1. Move mod_skunkweb to a separate project (because of the autoconf 
   dependency). 
2. Turn skunkweb into a regular distutils install; get rid of 
   autoconf (which probably means requiring that the conf file 
   specify a bit more, and that swmgr/swpython in normal use 
   would specify a conf file -- but swpython would become less
   important).
3. Move existing modules under a "skunk3" package, but provide 
   a way to adjust sys.path easily so they can be imported as usual
   from within skunkweb.  (We can't very well install lots of modules 
   with names like "Date", "web", "templating", etc., in site-packages; 
   and "skunk" is already in use by the skunk4 libraries, which are also 
   getting used here.)
4. Integrate WSGI internally; marshal request data into WSGI format 
   and make CONNECTION a wrapper around WSGI data (which would also be 
   globally available). (Eventual goal: not only to be able to embed 
   WSGI applications, but to make skunkweb applications embeddable as 
   such.)
5. Over releases, gradually move away from some skunk3 implementations
   to less tightly coupled skunk4 versions of libraries.

The goal would be to modernize and and modularize while providing
relatively smooth upgrades.

Comments and ideas welcome.

Cheers,

js

-- 
Jacob Smullyan

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