[Zope-PTK] Re: Wizards

[Andrew Wilcox]

At 02:31 PM 3/25/00 -0500, Paul Everitt wrote:
>Could someone take some time to summarize this discussion in the Wiki
>setup in the PTK area:

I'll volunteer to do this.

> At this point, I'm not sure if the lack of
> participation is due to lack of engagement on our part or the
> community's part.

Hmm... random thoughts...

Zope has a steep learning curve for developing products, so it will take
time to grow a developer community with the skills to help develop things
at the PTK level.  I've been using the system for five months and I'm only
now starting to see the ramifications of things like the interaction of
acquisition with the security system.
 
DC appears to be very successful at creating much amazing software :)  The
downside of this is that if you say you're going to create something like
PTK, my first reaction is great, I'll let *you* do that, and use it when
it's done.  Talk more about Zope limitations, gaps, bugs, missing features,
problems, and work that needs to be done...

Open up the Collector.  If you want a developer community, this has got to
be a priority.  By keeping unresolved issues hidden, you get a triple
whammy:  first, you foster the impression that DC is taking ownership of
fixing things and implementing features, so you discourage participation.
second, you lose out on other developers finding out about problems and
maybe knowing how to fix them.  third, I'm personally discouraged from
entering issues into the collector when they just disappear into the black
hole of unresolved issues (I was looking up a proxy permission bug the
other day and came across entries from last May that were still hidden); if
the things I put in were visible then at least I would have the hope that
my information might be useful to someone else who is running into the same
problem.

Documentation... the "interfaces" directory in PTK is *wonderful*.  You
know last week I ran across a btree implementation hiding away in Zope?
Completely undocumented of course, that's expected :), but I didn't even
know it existed...  I can't think of anything to suggest in addition to the
many documentation projects underway, but only to provide encouragement to
stay the course: developer documentation will breed more developers in time.

Andrew