[Zope-dev] Open Letter to zope-dev

[Paul Everitt]

Agreed completely on both of those points.  There's double good news on 
both:

1) Someone plans to do something about it.

2) Both are with community involvement.

On documentation, someone in the community has committed to taking over 
the Documentation page on zope.org and finally organizing the myriad of 
useful, but unlocatable, doc resources out there.

The second is pretty exciting as well.  I saw a presentation in Paris by 
Juan David Palomar, of Localizer fame.  (The presentation is now up at 
http://estce.act.uji.es:9673/localizer).  The presentation impressed me 
on the need to get someone into the core of Zope that knows all these 
details, but also convinced me that the Zope3 effort needs to anticipate 
the needs of i18n and l10n.

I spoke with the guys here doing the extreme programming session on 
Zope3, and they agreed.

To say it again:

1) I think the world of Zope needs to grow 10x in the next year.

2) ZC can't do it, and much of the action in Zope is non-U.S., 
particularly Europe.

3) Thus, Zope needs a strong, competitive internationalization story.

ZBabel and Localizer are good starts, but as jdavid says, both should be 
thought of as non-core projects that start influencing the core 
step-by-step.

--Paul

Robert Rottermann wrote:

> Friends,
> first thing I want is to express my huge gratitude to have something 
> like Zope and its community.
>  
> I have read all the all the mail that has been stirred by "that" open 
> letter.
> I agree very much and I am willing to contribute as much as I can that 
> zope should grow 10x.
> I found two things missing in the discussion so far that are crucial to 
> attain this goal:
>  
> - documentation
> To start using Zope doing something more than trivial is an incredibly 
> frustrating thing. Hunting for the right piece of documentation is very 
> very hard. The community is very helpful I agree readily. However asking 
> it should be the last resort and being forced to use it as an important 
> part of the developement effort is very cumbersome and time consuming. 
> And does not really take the frustration out of the process.
> Bruce Eckels postings to this list show that even a developer of his 
> statue is prone to the same effect.
> I am a seasoned programmer that started to deal with Zope exactly one 
> year ago. It is only now that I learn where to look for what piece of 
> information and to decide which one is relevant and which one is not.
>  
> - translation support
> Internationalisation is crucial. English in the user interface is just 
> not tolerated in a non English speaking part of the world. It is 10 
> years ago something like that would have been acceptable. I am from 
> Switzerland where we pride ourselves to be multilingual (6 Million 
> inhabitants 4 major languages, English being the fifth). However nobody 
> would think of having anything like English on a public website.
> There are a number of efforts towards translation support. However to 
> have any of them to succeed it needs the support of ZC which just does 
> not exist.
>  
> Now I have to hurry getting breakfast
> (or I get into troubles)
>  
> Robert
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