[Zope-dev] The future of Zope{2, 3} and Plone in Debian and Ubuntu

[Balazs Ree]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:15:12 +0200, Fabio Tranchitella wrote:

> Hello all!
> 
> In the last couple of weeks Brian Sutherland, Matthias Klose and I
> worked together to improve the Zope packaging for Debian and Ubuntu.
> This e-mail summarizes the problems we faced, the decisions that have
> been taken and the changes that we will upload to experimental and
> unstable in the next weeks.
> 
> Short summary
> =============
> 
> We switch from a monolithic Zope 3 package to individual packages for
> the libraries that are part of the ZTK (Zope Toolkit). Zope instance
> management tools are not supported anymore, as we suggest the use of
> WSGI.
> 
> We also drop support for Zope 2 and Plone in Debian and Ubuntu, asking
> for the removal of the packages from the distribution.

I am certainly one person that did use the Debian packages at the time 
when people first started to suggest against it. I dropped this habit 
when I needed to work most of the time with custom Zope and Plone 
versions that were too new or too rare to be in Debian yet. But I'm still 
using Debian's python2.4 right now to bootstrap my buildouts.

> The main problem for Zope2 is that the current stable upstream branch
> (2.12) still requires pthon2.4. This is not acceptable in Debian and
> Ubuntu, and Zope 2 is right now the only stopper for the removal of
> python2.4 from both Debian and Ubuntu.

What's the reason for the removal of python2.4? Is there a technological 
reason, or is this a policy decision? Don't forget that Plone users, who 
are also the biggest consumer group of Zope / ZTK, still will be users of 
2.4 for a while. The unified installer is not the only installation 
method used for Plone, in fact many users and the majority of deployments 
use python + buildout. These users will need to read documentation and do 
installation to be able to bootstrap their buildout, which is not exactly 
a reason for them to choose Debian / Ubuntu in this case.


-- 
Balazs Ree