[Zope-dev] who wants to maintain Zope 3?

[Dieter Maurer]

Lennart Regebro wrote at 2009-4-12 17:18 +0200:
>On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 08:51, Dieter Maurer <dieter at handshake.de> wrote:
>> I see myself rather as an application developer and conclude that
>> Zope may no longer be adequate to build large applications on top
>> of it -- applications that need to live and be maintained for many years
>> to come.
>
>Well, the existing Zope releases will not disappear or go away. The
>"worst" that can happen for you as a Zope 2 developer is that 2.12
>becomes the last release. Is that really a problem?

I fear it is a problem: maintenance includes extensions based on the platform
build so far. For these extensions, newer ways of doing things may be wanted.

>But yes, the only developments in Zope 2 the last five years or so has
>been more inclusion of Zope Toolkit technologies. But without that
>Zope 2 would have stopped as 2.7, more or less. So if you don't use
>any of the component architecture, Zope 2 releases since 2.8 has been
>mostly pointless. And again: Is that a problem?

We skipped indeed Zope 2.9 and Zope 2.10 -- but my newer colleagues
think they lost something.


But, to be clear: I am not against providing modern Zope features
in Zope 2. My objections are against instability of the interfaces
for these features.

For example:

  When upgrading from Zope 2.8 to Zope 2.11, I had to fight for
  several hours because Zope 3 interfaces have been changed:

    *  a convenience method "getView" has been removed from "zapi".

       True, it did not do much over "getMultiAdapter", but
       it had a speaking name and why should a convenience method,
       even if considered a bit redundant, harm much?

    *  skinning has been changed completely -- the former skin control methods
       have been removed

       I agree that the new skin control is better, but why not emulate
       the older methods with the newer ones?

    *  in some signatures, the parameter order has changed.

  To be honest, the quite high amount of time was not only caused
  by the Zope 3 changes but also by stupidity in our application.

> ...
>In short, I'm not sure what you are worried about.

Increasing maintenance costs for long living applications caused
by cosmetic changes in the Zope platform.



-- 
Dieter