[ZODB-Dev] 3.9.4 release?

[Jeff Shell]

On Nov 20, 2009, at 11:52 AM, Jim Fulton wrote:
>> If configured, sure.
> 
> I would not trust repozo + blob backups.

I don't trust Blobs. A year ago, I reverted all of the code I had for our CMS that supported Blobs as it was impossible to copy their data in a basic Zope 3 copy/past/move. I think that may have been fixed, but since there's practically zero documentation on how to use blobs, use them wisely, use them well, and use them in fairly plain Zope 3-ish applications, I lost confidence.

> Fair enough. Given that this provokes the symptom that was fixed.
> I can live with this.
> 
> I also would fear to rely on repozo in it's current state, but I don't have to.

We live in fear of most of the tools in their current state. So they pass the tests - whoopee! But the documentation is so bare and minimal that we (Bottlerocket) still don't properly configure anything. I guessed at some default values and those get copied around, hoping for the best. We've encountered problems with ZEO in the long-ago past that I'm sure were due to configuration misunderstandings that still hold over us to this day. We use ZEO, but I don't think we use it well.

Last time I looked for documentation, many of the documents seemed either from the early Zope 2 era or came from the Plone community. While thankful for some of the documents from the Plone community, we're not a Plone shop, nor a Zope 2 shop any more (except for a couple of customers). Some of the tools they reference are unavailable to us.

I still don't know what the data from zc.monitor means or how we can use that to adjust ZEO / ZODB configuration settings to improve performance of a site.

So while the tests can make us all confident that the ZODB/ZEO system works, how about some documentation coverage that could help us be confident that we're using it correctly?


For what it's worth, I rely on but also somewhat fear repozo - not because of its tests or lack thereof (it seems to work for me!), but because documentation and help for the scripts are lacking (fortunately, 'repozo' is the one exception. 'fsrefs' and 'fsdump' are mysterious. There's a lot of other tools in ZODB.scripts that seem rather antiquated, or intimately tied to Zope 2. But chances are that no one even knows those tools are there).


Thanks,
Jeff Shell
jeff at bottlerocket.net