[Zope-CMF] backporting GenericSetup to CMF-1.5

[Rob Miller]

hi all,

those of us planning out the next Plone releases are in a bit of a bind. 
  we really want to make use of GenericSetup's newer Z3-interface-based 
means of defining import and export handlers, so that we can start work 
on rewriting our migration engine to use XML import and export, and so 
we can keep up w/ CMF 2.0 as it moves forward.  however, we just had a 
release that broke all of the add-on products, and it's not really an 
option for us to break everything again by depending on CMF 2.0, which 
has removed a bunch of deprecated spellings that are still in common use 
throughout many Plone add-on products.

we realize, of course, that this is in part a result of us having fallen 
so far behind CMF's development cycle, but we are now earnestly trying 
to play catch-up, and to continue to keep up, without forcing all of our 
product authors to rewrite their products twice in 6 months just to keep 
them working.

to this end, it would be very useful for us to have a 1.5-compatible 
version of CMF that makes use of the newer Generic/CMFSetup semantics. 
this would allow us to use the new site creation code (which we've 
nearly completed) in our next release without breaking backwards 
compatibility with the existing add-on products.  this would also make 
it easier to keep up w/ CMF trunk development w/o having to maintain two 
radically different branches of Plone.  CMF 2.X would be required, of 
course, with the subsequent release.

how do folks feel about this?  (note that we, i.e. the plone developers, 
are willing to do the work.)  would you be willing to have an additional 
1.5 release, or perhaps a 1.6 release, which includes these changes? 
our current tentative release schedule has a Plone alpha in late 
december, beta in february, release some time in march.

thx for your input,

-r