Common issue: Maintainance of Zope products
Hello, while it is a profit for Zope that there is a lot of products for the different tasks I found out that there is quite a number of those packages which render unusable under certain Zope / Python versions, are unmaintained, undocumented or in a bad state. Examples: - LocalFS (see the discussions in the mailing lists) which in the end leads to patches which are out of control of the main Zope repository http://www.easyleading.org/easyhome/index_html?content=downloadsLocalFS - TinyTable and TinyTablePlus (I tried to clear some issues about it on this list and per mail to the authors but did never got any answer) - ... This is not a good reputation for Zope if users face this problem. Suggested solution for Zope Corp.: Just look at Debian organisation: There is a maintainer for every package. If a maintainer wants to stop maintainance (which seems to be tha case for some of Zope products) he is obliged to declare to orphan the package. If there is no volunteer for the package in question there is a Quality Assurance team which cares for bugs/ enhancements/new versions. This is organized via the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS). Please note that a software product without a person which feels responsible will sooner or later die and it would be a shame if this would happen for a number of Zope products. In my opinion Zope really needs such kind of BTS as any other big OS project. The homepage of each packages should contain a link to the list of bugs of this package to have a central repository. People who like to provide patches could send them to the BTS and so they will not be lost in space for further development. In my opinion this would really enhance the quality of Zope products and will attract even more users. Kind regards Andreas.
On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 07:38:51AM +0200, Tille, Andreas wrote:
Suggested solution for Zope Corp.: Just look at Debian organisation: There is a maintainer for every package. If a maintainer wants to stop maintainance (which seems to be tha case for some of Zope products) he is obliged to declare to orphan the package. If there is no volunteer for the package in question there is a Quality Assurance team which cares for bugs/ enhancements/new versions. ... People who like to provide patches could send them to the BTS and so they will not be lost in space for further development.
<offtopicflamewar mode="on"> Good idea, and if Debian maintainers forwarded bug reports to upstream authors this would be really perfect ! Unfortunately this is not the case very often... </offtopicflamewar> bye, Jerome Alet
On Tue, 14 May 2002, Jerome Alet wrote:
<offtopicflamewar mode="on"> Good idea, and if Debian maintainers forwarded bug reports to upstream authors this would be really perfect ! Unfortunately this is not the case very often... </offtopicflamewar> Well, I think you used the wrong tag: <offtopic> might be appropriate but I see no reason for flamewar if there are true issues rised. You are completely right that some Zope products are very bad maintained in Debian. I just cared for some products in a so called Non Maintainer Upload (NMU) because the maintainer did not care about his tasks.
But there was a solution for those so called Mostly Inactive Maintainers: The packages where put under the hands of QA and thus become free for other interested people. This is not the case for Zope products: If the author / maintainer stops working on the product you have noc chance and it is *not visible* for the end user. This is exactly the problem I want to address. Kind regards Andreas. PS: Just tell me about which Debian packaged products you are talking about and I try to see if something can be made better.
Aloha, --- "Tille, Andreas" <TilleA@rki.de> wrote: ...
This is not a good reputation for Zope if users face this problem.
Seconded...I find it annoying, anyhow! I recall a recent thread on this - I think the general response was something like "great idea, go ahead and do it..." ;-) At the least, though, this would seem useful:
If a maintainer wants to stop maintainance (which seems to be tha case for some of Zope products) he is obliged to declare to orphan the package. If there is no volunteer for the package in question there is a Quality Assurance team which cares for bugs/ enhancements/new versions.
...and there could be an option to 'kill it publicly' if no one wanted to take it on - IMO this would be better than a 'silent death' that the majority never hears about until trying to find, use, update, etc. some product or other that's legally but not publicly dead. Perhaps a simpler place to start than a whole Debian-style BTS is a 'dead or alive' status flag on listed products (and an obvious link to a list of products at zope.org...). cheers, John S. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com
On Tue, 14 May 2002, John Schinnerer wrote:
Seconded...I find it annoying, anyhow! I recall a recent thread on this - I think the general response was something like "great idea, go ahead and do it..." ;-) I know this kind of response in OS development. The problem is to make suggestions reasonable enough that someone greps the issue and starts implementing ;-). And no, I will not do it because I are busy caring about my Debian packages ;-).
Perhaps a simpler place to start than a whole Debian-style BTS is a 'dead or alive' status flag on listed products (and an obvious link to a list of products at zope.org...). Perhaps it wouldn't be so hard to implement a BTS because it is just Open Source (as well as the Mozilla BTS IRC).
Kind regards Andreas.
participants (3)
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Jerome Alet -
John Schinnerer -
Tille, Andreas