[Grok-dev] dependencies missing needed for Grok 1.1 backwards compatibility

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I think people misunderstood my proposal. I'm not talking about a 
complicated backwards compatibility package. I'm talking about something 
very simple.

I'm talking about the situation we face with Grok 1.1:

Grok 1.1 doesn't include zope.app.catalog anymore in its dependencies. 
It's not being pulled in anymore. Quite possibly other packages are not 
pulled in anymore either that were pulled in by Grok 1.0 code.

A project that *uses* Grok 1.0 will quite possibly import from 
zope.app.catalog directly however. And other places.

If I have this situation, I can read upgrade notes (handwave them into 
existence like everybody else in this thread) and expand my setup.py to 
include the list of packages that's now been retired.

Alternatively, I can read the upgrade notes and just expand my setup.py 
to include the grok-backwards package, version 1.1. It depends on 
zope.app.catalog and the rest. It doesn't do anything else.

For Grok 1.1 this isn't so important yet, as concretely we are not able 
to drop many packages yet.

My hope is that for Grok 1.2, we'll be able to drop a *lot* of packages. 
  Instead of maintaining a list in some documentation somewhere, we 
instead maintain the list in code, which is easier to test and easier to 
instruct people to use. So for Grok 1.2 grok-backwards will become very 
relevant, as hopefully the list of dropped packages is long.

Of course the goal is for people to adjust their code so they don't need 
grok-backwards anymore. But helping people to upgrade is something we 
need to do anyway.

Regards,

Martijn