There seems to be danger that this great support through a community member will have a fate similar to Tino's "in" patch:
that the incorporation into the Zope core is far too long delayed because important DC people fear "feature bloat".
It is not "feature bloat" in this case that is the main issue, it is (as stated in my comments in the proposal) the complexity this adds. Please understand that we are sometimes put in a difficult position - we get beaten up all the time about "zope being too complex", then get beaten up by other folks when we question a feature because we don't want to add to the complexity :) I would prefer that this discussion continue in the proposal area rather than on the list.
If you are interested in sorting along the lines
* case sensitive/insensitive * ascending/descending * locale aware * multi-column
you should go to the above site and voice your opinion.
You are correct.
As a general note:
It seems to me that DC is far too reluctant to accept contributions to Zope from community members:
* patches fixing bugs * patches implementing missing but useful features
I disagree, though I can see how it comes across that way. I think that a lack of resources to respond quickly enough plays a large part (but that is largely invisible to the community, so I can't fault you for your perception).
In my view
* bug fixing patches should always be accepted unless the patch is not easily understandable.
* feature patches should be accepted, if it makes Zope more consistent (as the upcoming "urlparam_expr" patch) or easier to use (as Oleg's sorting patch or Tino's in patch).
Great reluctance towards these contributions risks Zope to lose community support.
I agree with the first point, and it is generally true though there is often currently too much lag time. There will be good news forthcoming that will help that significantly soon. The second point is subjective - what is "more consistent" to one is sometimes "more inscrutible" to others. The whole point of the Fishbowl is to help us all come to smart decisions and reasonable compromises on such things. The Fishbowl also suffers a certain amount of neglect - which is another thing that we are trying to rectify. The Good News alluded to should help that a bit as well. I assure you that we are aware of, and not happy about, the frustrations you are feeling, but we _are_ working on fixing the process problems that are causing that.
I can tell from experience the frustration caused by DC ignoring contributions.
I invested considerable time to file several important ZCatalog bug reports with patches into the collector for Zope 2.1.6, just to see them ignored in all versions of Zope 2.2. Only for Zope 2.3.1, the issues have been addressed.
I still advice people to file bug reports and patches into the Collector, but personnaly I already start to think whether it is worth the effort....
It is worth the effort. I wish that we had a staff of dedicated Collector sweepers to make sure that every issue was taken care of quickly - we currently don't have that (yet! stay tuned). Right now, chances are that if there is any Collector sweeping being done it is likely to be me doing it, and that doesn't scale nearly enough to deal with everything in a timely manner. That will be changing. But in the meantime (not long), please understand that there is no great conspiracy against incorporating patches or features - we are simply trying to the best we can with what we have. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com