Well said. I mostly agree, however, there needs to be a balance. We are introducing a process for orderly deprecation of features. I hope it works. It's mainly useful for changes that are straightforward to recover from. We have to balance lots of different factors taking into account *everybodies* interests, the best we can *together*. Jim Andrew Milton wrote:
I think people on this list need to realize that eventually, the direction of any significantly large Open Source project is hijacked by the relatively small number of people actually doing the work.
The reasons for this are many-fold, but, normally come down to a lack of communication between the developers and the users, which is realized in a lack of understanding by the developers of what the users want.
This for the most part isn't generally a problem, until, the developers start to do things "for the user's own good", like remove features that are "kludgey", or a "hack", or <insert some other reason>, which generally means either noone wants to work on it, or some other change caused it to break, and noone wants to fix it.
Now to the credit of the Zope guys, they actually poll the users to find out, rather than just announce the demise of something. However, in general once you add a feature, you can be guaranteed, that somewhere, someone is using it, so removing it will always cause a problem. So there will always be an uproar when you poll.
You're never going to be able to reduce the feature set between point releases without upsetting some group of people. So why don't we stop all this nonsense now, and just agree, that you're never going to do that d8) You have Zope 3 to remove all the stuff you hate d8)
In my opinion if you change something, it's your responsibility to fix the resulting breakage. That's part of your responsibiliity to the rest of the community (i.e. the [mostly non-paying] customers). If you don't think you have this responsibility to us, then you should work on your own version of Zope, where you're not impacting anyone else.
For the record, I hate ZClasses... d8)
-- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org