[Zope-Annce] ZODB4 alpha 1 release

[Jeremy Hylton]

We've released ZODB4 alpha 1, the first official release of the ZODB
code from the Zope3 project.  You can get it at
http://www.zope.org/Products/ZODB4.

This release contains essentially the same software that will be in the
upcoming Zope3 milestone release.  This version of ZODB is very
different from ZODB3.  The Persistent base class is a new-style class,
allowing persistent objects to use many of the features of Python 2.2
new-style classes.

There are still many changes planned for future versions of ZODB4, but
the current release is stable enough to call an alpha.  The current test
suite passes with Python 2.2.2 and Python 2.3 CVS on both Linux and
Windows (2k).  It will be possible to migrate data out of a 4.0a1
database into some future version.

This release contains the top-level persistence, transaction, and zodb
packages, as well as zope.interface and zope.testing.  The
implementation depends on zope.interface, but only in fairly limited
way.  The zope.testing package is only used by a few unit tests.
The zodb package includes FileStorage, two storages based on BerkeleyDB,
and ZEO, a client-server protocol for ZODB.

Jeremy