On Mon, Oct 03, 2005, David H wrote:

Chris Withers wrote:

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Hi All,

I finally got around to putting all my presentations online from the conferences over the last few years.

The can now all be found at:

http://www.simplistix.co.uk/presentations

Have fun and let me know what you think!

cheers,

Chris

Chris,

I notice your presentation files have a ".sxi" file extension. Anyway to convert to something like pdfs?

That's the native OpenOffice.org presentation format. Bill -- INTERNET: bill@Celestial.COM Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. (Joseph Stalin)

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005, David H wrote:

Thanks Bill, I saw that in a few google hits but ... I figured that if a fair population wants to view the presentations then the files should be in a universal format - like pdf or rtf.

Its an interesting question: how many people who just wish to peruse the files will feel compelled to google and download new apps just to be able to read them?

Given that I don't run the Microsoft virus, Windows, on anything, have OpenOffice.org on all our Linux and OS X systems, and that OpenOffice.org software is freely available, I don't see that it's a problem. Bill -- INTERNET: bill@Celestial.COM Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ ``I don't care how little your country is, you got a right to run it like you want to. When the big nations quit meddling, then the world will have peace.'' Will Rogers

At 8:11 PM -0700 3/10/05, Bill Campbell wrote:

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005, David H wrote:

...

Thanks Bill, I saw that in a few google hits but ... I figured that if a fair population wants to view the presentations then the files should be in a universal format - like pdf or rtf.

...

Its an interesting question: how many people who just wish to peruse the files will feel compelled to google and download new apps just to be able to read them?

Given that I don't run the Microsoft virus, Windows, on anything, have OpenOffice.org on all our Linux and OS X systems, and that OpenOffice.org software is freely available, I don't see that it's a problem.

We don't all run presentation software, either. If you just want to review a presentation rather than create/edit it, a format like PDF can be a better choice, and that applies regardless of how you feel about Microsoft. Effectively, what you are saying to many people is 'rather than use a viewer app you already have, to view this you will need to download a multi-megabyte office suit just to look at it'. If you don't see that as a problem, well, its still a problem. Cheers David

Thanks for posting this, Chris. Very interesting. I would've liked to have been at the conferences where you gave these. ;-) I think you make some good points. My main gripe with Plone is its such a moving target. Hopefully as it matures this will get better.

Chris I agree that 2+ years should have produced maturity. Zope seems to be a lot more stable than Plone. Maybe the reason people focus on your Plone talk is you touch a chord with people who too are wrestling with Plone. Probably at least once a week the thought crosses our minds of ditching Plone and going back down to the Zope level, with some of our own stuff sitting on top of CMF. But then, Plone does provide some good things. If only these things would work consistently and not keep changing. Also while performance problems have been addressed in 2.1 there seem to still be migration problems and broken products which prevent people going to 2.1 yet. My colleague has spent a long time trying to migrate a Product he wrote, from Archetypes 1.2.5 to 1.3.4, due to the fact he had to hack around problems with references. My fear is as more features are added, what you describe as a shaky stack of complex fragile components will get ever more dependencies and therefore ever more complex and fragile. People often talk about the steep learning curve of Zope and Plone. When one is learning it, one tends to blame oneself for finding it difficult, and its a bad workman blames his tools. After a while though the question arises of why this seems to be harder to learn than say, some mathematical concept commonly considered hard to get your head around. The answer seems to be because its Plone's complexity and inconsistencies we are learning. This is not good and doesn't bode well for increasing mind share. This is not actually any worse than the J2EE / Java / class explosion world, but isn't one of the points of open source and collaboration that it should be much much better? It is great that so many people are willing to contribute their own free time, effort and resources, to write code that they freely share. It may well be that the quality of this code is miraculously good considering how its done by volunteers scattered geographically. That doesn't make the problems with Plone go away. It seems to me your recommendation to people to not use Plone at all, coming from someone who's been around in the Zope worldfor quite some time, is quite controversial but may in a roundabout way help if it forces people to make Plone more stable and mature. Well I guess I better don my asbestos clothing too. ;-) Regards Nick

Chris Withers wrote:

Nick Davis wrote:

...

there seem to still be migration problems and broken products which prevent people going to 2.1 yet.

Yup.

this strikes me as a bit unfair. to quote stefan holek from a post on plone-dev earlier today, most reported migration problems are due to: - Upgrading to Zope 2.8 without reading the release notes. - Third party products that are not yet fully compatible with Plone 2.1 and/or Zope 2.8. - Sites that have customized parts of Plone they shouldn't have touched in the first place. - Plone Team stupidity. thus, while it's true that we have made mistakes (and will continue to, no doubt), most of the problems are issues beyond our control. as for the broken products, that is a pandemic within the open source community, hardly unique to plone. how many zope products are out there of dubious quality, or that are poorly maintained? whenever you get a large community of developers, you get a mixed bag of talent and of follow-through. the suggestion you make in your talk of having a peer rating process for add-on products is a good one, certainly, and one that's been discussed before, but getting there takes some effort.

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My colleague has spent a long time trying to migrate a Product he wrote, from Archetypes 1.2.5 to 1.3.4, due to the fact he had to hack around problems with references.

Archetypes is the chief sinner in all of this, I'm afraid. It's trying to solve a very difficult problem, and one which needs tackling with structure and upfront and intuitive design rather than the organic tacking on of new "bitz" whenever anyone felt like it that AT has suffered through...

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My fear is as more features are added, what you describe as a shaky stack of complex fragile components will get ever more dependencies and therefore ever more complex and fragile.

Yup.

yes, AT is in many ways a mess. but, as you say, it's tackling a very difficult problem, and, like most attempts at tackling difficult problems, the first iterations were somewhat less than perfect. the same can be said for zope itself... there's a reason z3 was a complete rewrite. AT's problems are entirely recognized by those of us who use it heavily, and i can assure you that the AT developer pool has no intention of continuing to pile more cruft on top of a shaky stack. instead, we're looking at how we can break the framework apart into components that can all be glued together in a nice z3 fashion. there are a great many tools available to us now that were not available when AT was originally developed (adapters, events, views, etc.), and we have every intention of making use of them to improve the stack (by making it leaner and more efficient, NOT by adding features willy-nilly!). ideally, you'll be able to pick and choose from the various AT features, using adapters to glue the functionality you need (and only what you need) into your own products. the first iterations of this will probably also have some warts. but please don't assume that plone/AT developers don't see the same problems that you see, and that they aren't willing and able to learn from their mistakes. -r

Hello Some thoughts :

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- Upgrading to Zope 2.8 without reading the release notes. I followed the release notes but this didn't fix catalog errors. I am not the only one. This is apparently fixed in Zope 2.8.2 but that doesn't look like it can be downloaded yet.

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- Third party products that are not yet fully compatible with Plone 2.1 and/or Zope 2.8. Should this perhaps be the other way around? If those products used the APIs correctly, perhaps a new release of Zope/Plone should still support old APIs and/or deprecate them gradually and with warning? This is a difficult problem to address but sometimes it may be better to hold back on releasing something new if it causes things that depend on it to break. On the other hand I can understand peoples desire to release something new and cool (even if not quite ready) . ;-) And its hard to know quickly what the bugs are if you don't release it to the real world. So hard to know what to do..........

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- Sites that have customized parts of Plone they shouldn't have touched in the first place. This is an important issue. It is difficult not to touch things that one shouldn't. A trivial example - If you want your breadcrumbs to just list the breadcrumbs instead of say "you are here" you have to copy across global_pathbar.pt and take out "you are here". There is not another easy way to do it that I can see. If you then migrate to 2.1, that .pt has changed so you have to copy the new one and re-do it otherwise nothing renders. If you want to add another logo on the right of the header you have to hack Plone's templates further. Each change is in itself trivial but they add up and when you migrate, you;re left with stuff that doesn't work and spend quite a while resolving it. And thats for those of us savvy enough to use the filesystem. Those who customised through the ZMI will have a bigger headache.

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as for the broken products, that is a pandemic within the open source community, hardly unique to plone. True.

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AT's problems are entirely recognized by those of us who use it heavily, and i can assure you that the AT developer pool has no intention of continuing to pile more cruft on top of a shaky stack. . the first iterations of this will probably also have some warts. but please don't assume that plone/AT developers don't see the same problems that you see, and that they aren't willing and able to learn from their mistakes. It would seem Archetypes has improved over time.

My real worry is when we do have a new release of Plone sitting on top of Zope 3 we'll have a whole new set of bleeding edge code sitting on top of other bleeding edge code, while stuff that did work with a mature AT1.3.x (or 1.4.x or whatever) suddenly stops working. Hopefully this will prove to be an unjustified fear! Probably this is no-one's fault. It is the nature of open source. To compare, have to admit I tried to get Bricolage to work a while back, and ran into CPAN dependency hell. I wonder if perhaps the real problem is trying to do so much with so few resources. Linux has a very mature platform as much of its base, and a lot of commercial support which helps. Perl and the CPAN is quite mature now and also had quite a lot of commercial support. The good thing about commercial support is people being paid to do grunt work and run loads of tests and update documents. Both Linux and CPAN are very modular. It is relatively easy to change one part without knowing about other parts. I think it would be easier to find someone who could patch a broken CPAN module, than someone who could delve inside Zope and Plone. This is because many of us don't understand the various components of the underlying architecture, and a lot is changing for Zope 3. Also many Perl modules are widely used by many applications, whereas a lot of Zope code is only used by other Zope code.

Nick Davis wrote:

Hello Some thoughts :

...

...

- Upgrading to Zope 2.8 without reading the release notes.

I followed the release notes but this didn't fix catalog errors. I am not the only one. This is apparently fixed in Zope 2.8.2 but that doesn't look like it can be downloaded yet.

in some cases the problem will go away if you simply execute a 'len(catalog)' command, either from a script or from zopectl debug. YMMV.

...

...

- Third party products that are not yet fully compatible with Plone 2.1 and/or Zope 2.8.

Should this perhaps be the other way around? If those products used the APIs correctly, perhaps a new release of Zope/Plone should still support old APIs and/or deprecate them gradually and with warning? This is a difficult problem to address but sometimes it may be better to hold back on releasing something new if it causes things that depend on it to break. On the other hand I can understand peoples desire to release something new and cool (even if not quite ready) . ;-) And its hard to know quickly what the bugs are if you don't release it to the real world. So hard to know what to do..........

the problem is not with the APIs... those we have taken care to deprecate. the problems lie within template code (such as the problem you describe below), where it's much harder to maintain backward compatibility and still move forward.

...

...

- Sites that have customized parts of Plone they shouldn't have touched in the first place.

This is an important issue. It is difficult not to touch things that one shouldn't. A trivial example - If you want your breadcrumbs to just list the breadcrumbs instead of say "you are here" you have to copy across global_pathbar.pt and take out "you are here". There is not another easy way to do it that I can see. If you then migrate to 2.1, that .pt has changed so you have to copy the new one and re-do it otherwise nothing renders. If you want to add another logo on the right of the header you have to hack Plone's templates further. Each change is in itself trivial but they add up and when you migrate, you;re left with stuff that doesn't work and spend quite a while resolving it. And thats for those of us savvy enough to use the filesystem. Those who customised through the ZMI will have a bigger headache.

tres responded to this more eloquently than i'd be able to...

...

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as for the broken products, that is a pandemic within the open source community, hardly unique to plone.

True.

...

...

AT's problems are entirely recognized by those of us who use it heavily, and i can assure you that the AT developer pool has no intention of continuing to pile more cruft on top of a shaky stack. . the first iterations of this will probably also have some warts. but please don't assume that plone/AT developers don't see the same problems that you see, and that they aren't willing and able to learn from their mistakes.

It would seem Archetypes has improved over time.

My real worry is when we do have a new release of Plone sitting on top of Zope 3 we'll have a whole new set of bleeding edge code sitting on top of other bleeding edge code, while stuff that did work with a mature AT1.3.x (or 1.4.x or whatever) suddenly stops working. Hopefully this will prove to be an unjustified fear!

as tres said, z3 isn't really bleeding edge any more. i'm not saying that there won't be migration bumps.. i expect there will be. but there are a lot of folks with a lot of working code dependent on this stack, and we'll all be working together to get to the next level.

Probably this is no-one's fault. It is the nature of open source. To compare, have to admit I tried to get Bricolage to work a while back, and ran into CPAN dependency hell.

I wonder if perhaps the real problem is trying to do so much with so few resources.

this is, to me, the crux of the problem. there are a million things that could be better. i've got far more ideas for improvement than i have the time to give those ideas... we've all still got to get billable hours in. that being said, things are getting better with time, and i expect them to continue to do so.

Linux has a very mature platform as much of its base, and a lot of commercial support which helps. Perl and the CPAN is quite mature now and also had quite a lot of commercial support. The good thing about commercial support is people being paid to do grunt work and run loads of tests and update documents. Both Linux and CPAN are very modular. It is relatively easy to change one part without knowing about other parts. I think it would be easier to find someone who could patch a broken CPAN module, than someone who could delve inside Zope and Plone. This is because many of us don't understand the various components of the underlying architecture, and a lot is changing for Zope 3. Also many Perl modules are widely used by many applications, whereas a lot of Zope code is only used by other Zope code.

again, tres hit this pretty well... this problem is fundamental to z2's monolithic, mix-in based approach. there was no way, until z3 came along, to play w/ zope and still remain strongly componentized. now that z3 is out, and we have five to expose z3 tech w/in z2, we're all eager to tear apart our monoliths into their little pieces/parts, making it easier for developers to be productive without having to understand the entire stack. it's not perfect now, and it never will be. but there are a lot of smart people involved, and things have been improving and will, IMO, continue to do so. the one point that chrisw concedes to plone is that it has a rockin' community. i will attest to that... and would ask folks to not underestimate the power of that. i've had more fun at plone sprints than i can put into words, and i'm no stranger to fun, so my bar is pretty high. i've also learned more about programming from this group of folks than any other single source of information, period. when i showed up, i was a novice w/ no best practices knowledge, and probably wouldn't have been allowed to the table if the community was inherently exclusive of those w/o pre-existing development skills. now i'm on the core team, and have gained a bit of respect w/in the community as someone whose code and ideas can be trusted. the social fabric that the plone community has developed IS the key to its success, and will continue to be, and that's just fine w/ me. -r

Hi Nick, Nick Davis wrote:

BTW Both Chris and I come from the UK where complaining about things is a national sport so please no-one take offence. ;-)

Nah, the Plone stuff is beyond mere national past time. The excruciating agony it's caused me on a fairly regular basis for a number of years now is what's behind it, and the talk I gave at the Plone conference is merely a more in depth look at why it makes my cry ;-) Chris -- Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting - http://www.simplistix.co.uk