[Zope-dev] List of packages in the ZTK

[Jim Fulton]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 1:05 PM, Martijn Faassen<faassen at startifact.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> Fabio Tranchitella wrote:
>> it is evident that there is no consensus on the list of packages that are
>> part of the Zope Toolkit. As Gary suggested me, it looks like the concept
>> of ZTK is different for each developer and it is more or less "the packages
>> I use and I care about".
>
> In a way the consensus should be reflected by the list you mention:
>
> http://docs.zope.org/zopetoolkit/about/packages.html
>
>  > We need a policy to define the ZTK in an explicit way, otherwise we
>  > will never get a *real* ZTK KGS that can be used to build applications
>  > and the whole concept of ZTK will always be fuzzy.
>
> We have a list. I propose that in order to stop long discussions about
> what should be in this list, we just start with what's in this list, by
> circular definition. :)

+1

Except that the "under review" list is pretty long.  Shall we include
everything that's under review as a starting point? We can always
lobby to remove some later.

> We need to get a procedure in place to do compat tests of what's in that
> list, dependency graph guarding of what's in that list, and locking down
> a KGS for that list.

That's what Fabio and others are working on. (Well, the first and third.)

> I think that since we have a list doing all these
> things is only a matter of work - there's no fundamental questions we
> need answered before we can do this work. Once the base is there we can
> expand on it.

Sounds good.

>
> I think what we need is a policy for adding packages into this list, and
> retiring packages from the list.

Yup

> Removal: I think an informal show of hands that asks "is this package
> important?" on the mailing list is useful there. The other is a
> situation that nothing depends on that package anymore. Once those two
> are reached, I think it'd be as simple as petitioning the steering group
> to have a package removed.

Who's on the steering group?

> Addition: this one is much tougher. New packages can get added if
> they're factored out of existing packages, that's easy. But
> fundamentally new package? We need to cross that bridge when we get to
> this. I suspect innovation for the time being will mostly be around the
> toolkit, not in it, or in the form of changes to existing packages. I
> think generally candidates for addition are packages that would change
> the way we arrange toolkit-based libraries themselves - I recall Shane's
> WSGI discussions as an example.

+1

> I realize that to build "real" apps everybody will come up with a list
> of extra packages beyond the ZTK that they feel are needed too. Let a
> thousand flowers bloom I'd say - we just need a clean, fertile soil that
> we need to maintain. We already got plants growing in the soil anyway
> (Zope 2, Grok, bfg, and lots of Zope 3 apps).

+1

> And of course there's some philosophy behind what's in the list now:
> it's a set of libraries shared by Zope 2, Zope 3 (whatever that is) and
> Grok. That's not the only answer and it's not quite the correct answer
> even,

It's a good enough start.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton