[Zope-dev] Time-based releases a good idea?

[Chris Withers]

Florent Guillaume wrote:
> Yes but the deprecation has been there for a while, and the third party 
> product developers have been ignoring the warning. Their loss.
> And this is only for Zope 2.10 which I doubt these third party products 
> are using at the moment.
> If we don't remove things at some point, there's no point in doing 
> deprecation warnings.

This and things like it have been niggling me for a while now and I 
guess this finally prompted me to write a mail on it...

I know the good reasoning behind the time-based releases, but have they 
really worked out?

As someone else who never has enough time to "keep up" with releases 
I've found the introduction of time-based releases a generally negative 
thing.

I don't say that lightly, they certainly sounded like a great idea when 
they were introduced but I've experienced more bugs, a helluva lot more 
pointless deprecation squeal and a lot more "upgrade fear" since this 
process was introduced. For me, the fact that Zope 2.9.3 still emits 
deprecation warnings on a fresh install (zLOG...) is a pretty bad sign.

I dunno, it just feels like features are being rammed in and a _lot_ of 
stuff is being deprecated, sometimes without as much thought as should 
be given. Change for change's sake is never a good thing. As a result, 
I'm still mainly on a mix of Zope 2.7 and 2.8, and finally taking timid 
steps to 2.9 for some projects, all of which have required new versions 
of just about every add-on product.

Now, this could all be seen as fair game, Zope _is_ going through a 
period of big and positive change as Zope 2 and Zope 3 converge, things 
like zLOG finally get put to rest and we move onto newer more powerful 
versions of python.

If that's the case, then I hope we, as a community, "get there" at some 
point and can get back to focusing on the stability of the good ol' days.

Would be interested to know what other people think...

Chris

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