[Zope-dev] Re: [Zope3-Users] Re: Zope 3.4.0 candidate 1 Released

[Martin Aspeli]

Christophe Combelles wrote:
> Stephan Richter a écrit :
>> Not responding to anyone in particular:
>>
>> I see there are plenty people with opinions. I would love not to do the Zope 3 
>> releases anymore! I am tired of the endless discussions.
>>
>> Think I am frustrated? Absolutely!
>>
>> All the suggestions made here require more work, more manpower. But there is 
>> nobody doing the work. In fact, I am not even officially the release manager 
>> anymore. Remember, other people took over that job, because they wanted to do 
>> a release every 6 months? I said back then: Forget it. Nobody believed me and 
>> now it has been almost a year since the 3.3.1 release. The only reason I am 
>> doing the releases is to tell the world that we are still out there, 
>> improving the framework. 
> 
> I believe the reason of your frustration comes from the fact there are probably 
> not so many people who fully understand the whole release process, the kgs, the 
> buildout, how things are scattered into all these eggs, and all the technology 
> surrounding the transition that zope is going through.
> I'm not here for a long time and I had to spend hours reading docs and searching 
> every single bit of information in the svn.

I think you're right on the money. I really have very little idea of how 
Zope 3 is supposed to be used right now, or what "Zope 3" really is (and 
no-one fully agrees, as evidenced by other posts in this thread). Having 
to piece together that information from the mailing list is pretty dire.

The website work that the Foundation has commissioned/supported is part 
of this. It's about mapping out the parts of the Zope universe - Zope 2, 
CMF, Zope 3 libraries, Grok... People like Philipp and Martijn are 
drafting the texts and pictures that attempt to clarify all this. When 
those are public and coherent, we'll see how people react and revise 
accordingly. That'll help, and will probably be a catalyst for the 
community to actually get this story straight. Right now it's not.

Me? I'm just trying to prod people and manage expectations. Personally, 
I am fully depenent on the people doing Zope 2 release management and 
Grok work to make sense of these libraries and package it up in some 
hopefully-useful way for me to use. I don't think "Zope 3" is a starting 
point the way Zope 2 is/was - I think it was trying to be that for a 
while, but that people changed their minds. Now, Grok is the starting 
point. Maybe Zope 2 w/ Plone form another starting point for a certain 
audience. Once people know about Zope, they may want to use some of its 
packages (I used zope.component with Pylons, for example), but that's 
only if they really want to and already know and love Zope.

And yeah - the release management story is a big part of this. As 
Stephan pointed out, it's completely irresponsible to stop doing 
(regular!) releases the established way until the new way is clearly 
defined and documented and a until migration path exists.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book