[Zope-dev] Zope components and revision control with cvs

[Shane Hathaway]

On 1 Aug 2002, Gary Poster wrote:

> Hi Shane.  I've been thinking about Zope versioning, and I also did a
> bit of list searches for past discussions on this general topic.  One
> problem that seems pertinent to really any external-to-zope versioning
> system, including Subversion, is dealing with non-folder object
> managers.  If you want to manage the contents of these special object
> managers individually in your versioning system, you're running into
> some trouble, some parts of which seem insurmountable to me at the
> moment (from my admittedly limited knowledge ;-).

It's really only a theoretical problem.  To store the extra data about
folderish objects, you can save the data in a hidden file called, for
example, ".properties".  The theoretical problem is that someone might
give an object that name, since it's perfectly legal.  In practice, you
can just prevent people from creating Zope objects with a name that starts
with a dot.  99% of the users won't mind at all, and those that do can
use two dots instead. :-)

> I find myself agreeing with earlier posters (earlier as in 2001--Paul,
> for one, I think) who said that Zope itself might need to support full
> versioning, a la DeltaV or somesuch, itself.  This makes sense to me,
> but I didn't find any historical documents on zope.org as to progress or
> as to reasons for abandonment of this approach.

I've thought a lot about Zope object versioning, and I can't see any
reason that Zope can't use an external repository.  It would help a lot to
work with a repository that is transactional and can version
directories--but guess what, that's exactly what Subversion is good at!

> What's the deal?  Would this be a huge effort, or is it definitively
> problematic for a reason I don't see, or is it stalled for some other
> reason?

It's only stalled because we're all busy working on other cool stuff. :-)

Shane