[ZF] Re: [Zope3-dev] Official Zope packages

[Jim Fulton]

On Jul 25, 2007, at 10:30 AM, Christian Theune wrote:

> [Moving the discussion from zope3-dev at zope.org]
>
> Am Mittwoch, den 25.07.2007, 10:05 -0400 schrieb Jim Fulton:
>> Some high-level comments.
>>
>> I think you raise some good questions.
>>
>> I'm not sure that what namespace package something is in is a good
>> indicator of "officialness" or quality.
>
> It's a very simple low-tech indicator.

So we don't disagree. :)

>
>> I'm not sure what the value of "officialness" is.
>
> My interest is to use it as a way to collectively decide where I (and
> gocept) spend time contributing.

OK. Since I don't know what it means, I don't think I'd use it that way.

> The repository is becoming a bit too large to randomly look at  
> stuff and
> still be efficient and effective.

Potentially, the PyPI trove classifiers are helpful for this.  You  
don't want to randomly look for things, I agree.  I'm guessing that  
most people want to look for packages based on:

- what they do

- their quality

- their maintainedness

> I just had an Idea: It could help to think a bit different and move  
> away
> from "official" or "core" to a different concept:
>
> The repository always hosted multiple projects. I never paid too much
> attention to the CMF packages and didn't pay attention to the ZODB
> initially.
>
> Zope 2, Zope 3, ZODB, CMF are easy to distinguish as points of focus.
>
> 200+ packages sitting next too each other don't allow any focus at  
> all,
> making it hard for me to decide which of those to support.
>
> I'm happy to support something with many packages, however, 200+ is  
> just
> too much.
>
> Maybe establishing some working groups that take care of sets of
> packages might be worthwhile.
>
> We could look at the existing packages and try to come up with some
> groups where people could say "Hey, I'm interested in this topic in
> general" and contribute.

...

IMO, it is not  a good goal to find maintainers for projects in the  
repository just because they're there.  It might be a good goal to:

- Move projects out of the respository or to an unmaintained section  
of the respository when they cease to be maintained.

- It might also be useful to create a separate area of the repository  
for exploratory projects.

For me, there are two criteria for decoding what to work on:

- They help or interest me (or ZC) directly,

- They are important for furthering the health of the community or  
Zope brand.

I don't spend as much time as some might think I do or should  
thinking about what falls in the second category.   I pitch in when  
something's obvious and when I can.  It would be nice if more people  
helped figure that out. (I miss Paul's contributions there.)

A separate issue I thought you were talking about is making it easier  
for consumers to tell what they should use, but I don't think that is  
the problem you are trying to address in this discussion.

...

I'd be interested in hearing other folks thoughts on this.

> If we could establish working groups that have some focus, those  
> groups
> could decide to take over the maintenance of a certain package or not.

The authors of the foundation documents seem to anticipate this kind  
of thing.  It needs someone to get it started.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton			mailto:jim at zope.com		Python Powered!
CTO 				(540) 361-1714			http://www.python.org
Zope Corporation	http://www.zope.com		http://www.zope.org