[Zope 2.4.1] I believe there's a problem with the z2.py startup script in that the READ_ONLY flag is ignored by Zope/__init__.py (line 564, following the "# Import Zope (or Main)" comment). Line 110 of __init__.py creates a FileStorage object, but does not include the optional read_only argument to its constructor. I was trying to do some exploring inside python (by importing Zope) without stopping the Zope server that I had running on the same database. I couldn't figure out a way to import Zope with a read-only variable set, so I started analyzing what z2.py was doing. Eventually I realized that even starting z2.py with a -r argument caused the same problem. If this problem is fixed for z2.py, I'm hoping it would give me the hook I need to import Zope read-only.