[Zope-dev] [RfC] Removal of old stuff in Zope 2.10

[Paul Winkler]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 07:52:02AM +0100, Andreas Jung wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> for next release we plan to replace several parts with the corresponding 
> components from Zope 3 (e.g. ZPT??). Philipp is working on a proposal on 
> that issue. In addition I would like to get rid of some old stuff that is 
> no longer maintained and buggy:
> 
> 
> - ZopeTutorial (could be ripped off without implications and made available
>   for download on zope.org)

+1

> - HelpSys - from a programmers view pretty much useless and not very
>   helpful. I consider to replace it with something more useful (not sure
>   we can re-use apidoc from Zope 3 in some way, perhaps the inclusion
>   of Dieter's Docfinder might be more useful for programmers)

-0 

Whenever this topic comes up, people speak of HelpSys as if it's all API
documentation for programmers. In fact the lion's share of it is
user-oriented online structured text documentation which is IMNSHO very
good to have.  And many third-party products provide such documentation
of their own.  Especially when I was new to Zope, I read them
constantly.

+1 that the API docs should be extracted from interfaces and
should leverage zope3 technology.  See my old proposal here:
http://www.zope.org/DevHome/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/SanitizeHelpSysAndAPIReference
... and the ensuing discussion:
http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2004-April/022226.html

Status of that proposal: I did a large portion of step 1 and
step 5 in the 2.7 version of the Zope Book, but - as Dieter
predicted - I ran out of steam long before finishing it.
It's a tedious job, and I only got small amounts of help from a couple
of volunteers.

-1 on removing the structured text docs. I don't know if anybody
actually was proposing to remove it, but since nobody mentions it,
it's easy to conclude that :-)

All this stuff will take work... Maybe we could have a doc sprint at pycon?

> - Gadfly(DA) - do we really need this? We discussed this already. In my
>   opinion the purpose of Gadfly is only educational but nothing that one
>   really needs or uses for production. It could be removed and made
>   available for download on zope.org.

+1
 
> And my favourite enemy in Zope: ZClasses :-) I would like to mark them 
> _clearly_ as an obsolete feature (DeprecationWarning, Warnings in the ZMI 
> and the Zope Book). I _don't_ propose to remove them at some point but ppl 
> should be aware that they are using one of the most-scary components in 
> Zope (please no further discussion about the pros and cons of 
> ZClasses..this discussion took already place already a bunch of times on 
> the list).

+1
 

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com