On Mon, 7 Dec 1998, Alan Wostenberg wrote:

I'm unfamiliar with Zope. Would it be an adequate tool to build an internet based bug tracking system: a clone of jitterbug (see http://samba.anu.edu.au/jitterbug/ or http://www.gnome.org/cgi-bin/bugs )Would such a project be meaured in days, weeks, or months? Thanks!

Funny you should mention that... that's the main reason I'm looking at Zope. We have an internal tool for call tracking here which I wrote in Perl before my Great Python Awakening, and before the existence of Jitterbug (which I haven't looked at but I'm aware of its existence). The system in use here has proved reliable but a) it's written in Perl :-) b) it does not implement a fast enough search c) it does not yet handle multipart messages I've written the bit which digests MIME (well, most of it is in the standard Python library!) but storing all the little bits breaks the model of the previous script. I was going to rewrite everything (except Better, this time, of course) in Python and thus I came across Bobo. That was just a week ago, so I waited for Zope to see what it was all about. Zope looks like it will do what I want very well, but alas there is almost zero documentation to help me figure out how to do it. It should be relatively simple, as soon as I figure out how to define new classes. The classes are "messagepart" (decoded data from a MIME message part plus Content-Type), "message" (email header plus list of messageparts), "call" (list of messages plus open-and-assigned-to-user-x/closed, notes field, etc) and "user" (user-specific information such as name, email signature, preferred way to display certain items). I presume that each one of these classes would be defined as a "product", but I'm not even positive about that yet. (I'm at Zen level 0.2, I'd say.) In short, if I were a Zope expert, I think I could whip up a calltrack system in a week. Given that I'm not a Zope expert, I think it will take n+1 weeks, where n is the number of weeks it takes for me to learn what I need to learn about Zope (how to define classes, how MailHost fits in, how to create new objects when email comes in). Unfortunately so far it's looking like n >> 1... -- James Strickland Perforce Software

On Mon, 7 Dec 1998, Alan Wostenberg wrote:

I'm unfamiliar with Zope. Would it be an adequate tool to build an internet based bug tracking system: a clone of jitterbug (see http://samba.anu.edu.au/jitterbug/ or http://www.gnome.org/cgi-bin/bugs )Would such a project be meaured in days, weeks, or months? Thanks! That depends upon how much you know about Bobo^H^H^H^HZope ;) If it's your first project, than you should give yourself a budget of 1 week, if you know what one is doing, it's probably nearer to 1 day or so :) (Just a guestimate *g*)

Andreas -- Win95: n., A huge annoying boot virus that causes random spontaneous system crashes, usually just before saving a massive project. Easily cured by UNIX. See also MS-DOS, IBM-DOS, DR-DOS, Win 3.x, Win98.