[ZF] Thoughts about the process

[Chris McDonough]

On Aug 27, 2007, at 4:28 PM, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:

>> - There was a document describing what is expected of a "zope"  
>> package (it has its own
>>   setup.py, it lists its dependencies properly, it is released  
>> with "real" version numbers,
>>   it's registered in the cheeseshop.. or whatever).
>
> Precisely that is what I've been trying to accomplish with my  
> "Guide for maintaining software in the Zope repository" [1].

Excellent, thank you!  That looks about perfect to me, exactly what I  
was thinking of.  Very nice.

> You're right that eggs alleviate the problem of a "core" definition  
> somewhat. I still think it quite necessary to define "working  
> sets", in other words, a definition of packages and their versions  
> that are known to work well together. We can't expect every Zope  
> developer to figure this out by him/herself. I'm not saying there  
> has to be *one* working set definition. The working sets should  
> just be community-managed, be version-controlled and be treated as  
> releases when it comes to "blessing" them for the rest of the world.
>
>
> To summarize, I agree with you that ensuring a common process for  
> the individual packages does most of the trick. This is what my  
> guide is aiming to do. Apart from that, we need to figure out the  
> working set bit. I think a technical discussion is needed here (not  
> appropriate for this list).

I have no opinion on "working sets" (as opposed to releases) but I do  
agree it's not appropriate for this list to have a discussion about  
that here.  I think the best we might hope for here is a consensus  
(or nonconsensus ;-) that actively managing packages (or more  
precisely, "distributions" in the setuptools sense) and their  
interdependencies without regard of how any particular SVN repository  
is arranged is important enough to be "blessed" in any development  
process we decide on.

- C