[Zope-dev] FTP interface being worked on?

[Fred Wilson Horch]

Hi again,

I'm commenting by e-mail because the Wiki interface is too horrible for
me to face on a Saturday night when I should be doing other things. ;-)

Chris McDonough wrote:
> 
> I've put the proposal up at
> http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/RepresentingObjectsOnTheFilesyst
> em.
> 
> Let me know what you think!

This is a great start.

My major question is I don't understand the design decision to allow
lossy representation.

Seems to me this is a recipe for disaster.  You aren't working with
Microsoft on this one, are you? ;-)  Will there be some undocumented API
call that only Zope employees know about to get the serialized lossless
representation? ;-)

The proposal states in part:
> "Lossless" general serialization is not an explicit goal. If a developer
> wishes to make his or her object serializable to a directory structure,
> he or she will need to implement methods of an API on the object
> instance which allow it to be represented adequately enough to be
> reconstructable into its original Python representation when it's
> "imported". If this API is not implemented by the developer, the result
> is undefined

I think lossless serialization should be an explicit goal.  If a
developer doesn't provide specific object serialization methods, then a
default method (perhaps XML) should be invoked that is lossless even if
hard to work with.

The worst thing you can do is make some things hidden in the ZODB and
only available through a certain interface.

The whole point for us is to get full control of our objects through
CVS.

I need to get started on something for our project so we can manage our
objects via CVS by the beginning of May.

I have taken a look at http://www.zope.org/Members/tseaver/FSDump and
http://www.zope.org/Members/sspickle/ZCVSMixin.

Can anyone tell me where my effort would best be spent?  Would it be
best for me to start with FSDump or ZCVSMixin and corrupt them to serve
my evil plans, or should I start from scratch based on the object
serialization discussion we've been having (but with the explicit goal
of lossless serialization, unlike Chris' proposal)?

To understand what I want to do, you can read my two project proposals
at

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/proposals/ftp_access/?cvsroot=ecoaccess
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/proposals/xml_rpc/?cvsroot=ecoaccess

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Fred
-- 
Fred Wilson Horch			mailto:fhorch@ecoaccess.org
Executive Director, EcoAccess		http://ecoaccess.org/
P.O. Box 2823, Durham, NC 27715-2823	phone: 919.419-8354