[Zope-dev] Zope Toolkit - packages with zope.app dependencies

[Martijn Faassen]

Hanno Schlichting wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Martijn Faassen
> <faassen at startifact.com> wrote:
>> Hanno Schlichting wrote:
>>> The ZTK no longer contains any zope.app packages.
>> I think we should be careful to just remove the zope.app packages from
>> the ZTK entirely. I.e. we should maintain the versions of the zope.app.*
>> packages that were in Zope 3.4 (or at least the original Zope 3 tree) in
>> the ZTK for the time being. Otherwise we make people's life rather
>> difficult.
> 
> I disagree. In my opinion it's not part of the job of the ZTK to
> provide backwards compatibility with Zope 3. The toolkit is not a
> replacement for all of Zope 3 and you cannot run a Zope 3 application
> even after following all the refactorings on the toolkit alone. If
> users of Zope 3 want an upgrade story, they need to get together and
> make a new Zope 3 release which is based on the ZTK.

Totally ignoring our community's responsibility towards backwards 
compatibility and delegating it to a mythical set of "Zope 3 
maintainers" isn't an option at all.

We need to provide an upgrade path from pre-ZTK applications to ZTK 
applications. This upgrade path can take the form of a set of versions 
of zope.app.* libraries that people can choose to install for backwards 
compatibility. We should maintain this set of versions as part of the 
ZTK's test regime at the very least, otherwise we'll inevitably break 
something.

> For Zope2 we have covered the upgrade story already. Zope 2.12 uses
> its own KGS, which includes the entire set of zope.app packages in
> compatible versions. 

Let's please please please maintain that set of zope.app.* packages 
centrally. Zope 2 isn't the only consumer of these packages.

> On a more practical note, it's actually just not helpful to include
> version pins for any zope.app packages in the ztk.cfg. I can add any
> arbitrary set of version definitions there. Then run the test-ztk
> tests and all tests will always pass. Since the packages under tests
> don't include nor depend on any zope.app packages, their test result
> is independent of any zope.app version pins.

Then we certainly need to do more than version pins. We also need to 
test these packages.

-1 to this change. I'm going to add the zope.app.* packages back to the 
ZTK until we've had a proper discussion about how, as a Zope community, 
we go forward with this. Delegating this responsibility *separately* to 
sub projects is just plain silly.

Regards,

Martijn