[Zope-dev] Product standardization

[Evan Simpson]

Chris McDonough wrote:

> Though I can't speak at all for DC regarding this matter (this is
> probably Chris Petrilli's or Brian Lloyd's territory), I like the idea
> of having a slightly more formal definition of what constitutes a "good"
> product, even if that definition only consisted of a couple of pages of
> "shoulds" and "shouldn't"s.  I also like the idea of a loose sort of
> peer review (other than someone just downloading the product, finding
> out it doesn't work, and posting to the mail lists).  I would be willing
> to work on both.

I got a (small) taste of what this could be like with PythonMethods;
Michel Pelletier sent me WebDAV methods and prompted me to carefully hunt
down unneeded transaction-provoking attribute changes.  Jeff Rush sent a
document_src for source viewing and PrincipiaSearchSource for ZCataloging.
The methods were very small - a handful of lines each - I had just never
thought about them.

Somebody really ambitious (my hand is *not* raised!) could write a simple
guide on zope.org.  Start with a checklist of "features" or "design
aspects" such as "WebDAV enabling", "Persistence issues", "Searching",
"Direct Traversal",  etc.   Have each item link to a description of the
"feature" and a simple set of example methods and issues.

Frankly, even some very hurried and rough notes from DC about which base
objects and interfaces are deprecated and which are up-and-coming would be
fantastic (or does this exist, somewhere?).  I would be happy to take
something like that and edit it into a more polished document, but I can't
write it...  I just look at existing classes and copy what seems to work
:-(.

Consider 'isPrincipiaFolderish', 'isDocTemp', and their ilk.  These seem to
be ad-hoc flags for the sort of thing Jeff plans to replace with
interfaces, and I had no idea until recently that I should be using them in
my own Products.

This is *not* the usual cry for DC to provide more documentation; It is,
rather, a request for more raw information.  I suppose that the best thing
I could do would be to get up to speed with ZDP and make some rough
outlines, so that at least the folks with the deep Zen will have a
framework on which to heap their wisdom without spending a lot of time
organizing their thoughts.

Evan @ 4-am