[Zope-dev] zope.globalrequest?

[Martin Aspeli]

Benji York wrote:

>> And what about zope.agxassociation, zope.bforest, zope.bobo,
>> zope.generic, zope.ucol, zope.wfmc and zope.xmlpickle to name a few of
>> the more than 30 packages already in the zope.* namespace which are
>> neither part of any Zope release nor are likely to ever be?
> 
> Some of those were past mistakes.  Let's not repeat them.

But you will repeat them. :)

There's a chicken and egg problem here. Renaming packages is painful and 
penalises early adopters. However, you often don't know whether a 
package is going to be good (or maintained or just plain useful) until 
it's been implemented and tested in real life.

To me, means "by the people of", i.e. zope.* means "by the people of the 
Zope community", or what not. A package written for the Zope core 
framework, by the Zope people, discussed on the Zope dev list belongs in 
this namespace.

A good rule of thumb is "where is it discussed". If I have a problem 
with a zope.* package, I'd look at zope3-user or zope-dev. For z3c.* I'd 
hesitate to use zope-dev. The same goes for plone.* (plone-dev) or 
collective.* (product-developers).

This certainly isn't perfect, though. There's a plone.* package in the 
Zope svn for possible inclusion in CMF one day; Plone ships with 
collective.*, borg.*, and archetypes.* packages.

But really, the main point of namespaces is just to avoid naming 
collisions and make things easier to find. Let's not get *too* hung up 
on them. zope.globalrequest is probably fine. What matters is whether 
people actually use it, and whether it's maintained, covered by adequate 
tests or so on. No-one's going to go look at all zope.* packages and try 
to install them. They're going to install of a KGS or release and look 
for things in the documentation.

However, my preference would've been z3c.globalrequest, since it's 
really a "community add-on" and wasn't really created as a proper part 
of Zope or discussed in the context of that.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book