In the last year I have seen many people complaining about this with DC doing anything about it. Makes you think!
That's not quite true - there have been several discussions of this in the past, and we have not ignored it. There were (and still are - more below) concerns about namespace pollution and stomping on variables that people may have currently defined in applications. Some alternatives have been proposed, though so far none have been implemented: http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/DTMLWiki/NamedDTMLInLoop http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/DTMLExpressionSyntax
DC are pretty skilled py-engineers. If they don't want to use sequence-item, then with what reason?? So, DC, people what's so cool about sequence-item that you can't get with sequence_item?? What's the underlying reasoning here?
Largely a concern that the DTML namespace is too much like the wild west already, and that the changed names could break apps that have already defined "sequence_item" or similar names, either for their own simplification or for totally other purposes. That said, I think that this has come up enough recently, clearly has support, and provides enough of a simplification win that it should go on the plan for Zope 2.4. For those wondering "why not 2.3.1?", 2.3.1 is a bug-fix release, and this will be a feature with a non-trivial documentation impact. For more info see the Zope release policy: http://dev.zope.org/Resources/ZopeReleasePolicy.html Putting it in the next feature release will allow us to make sure the documentation is updated accordingly, and give people who may be stepped on by the namespace change a chance to assess their apps before upgrading. People who need the change "Right Now" can continue to use the patch - in fact I'd encourage people to so we can shake out any problems. We should also make a project area on dev.zope.org so that we can have a common area to plan what still needs to be done (it sounds like the patch is close, but not 100%) and what collateral activities need to be done (what documentation artifacts need to be updated, etc.) The 2.4 release will be largely about getting Zope on Python 2.1 and I am intentionally keeping the 2.4 plan relatively small so that we can get it out in Q2. I've added the DTML namespace changes to the plan at: http://dev.zope.org/Resources/zope_240_plan.html I'll need one person to volunteer to be the point man on this, to coordinate with me on integration and keep the project area up to date. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations www.digicool.com