[Zope-dev] the Zope Framework project

[Kent Tenney]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 6:24 AM, Hermann Himmelbauer <dusty at qwer.tk> wrote:
> Am Dienstag 03 März 2009 00:48:38 schrieb Lennart Regebro:
>> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 00:16, Martijn Faassen <faassen at startifact.com>
> wrote:
>> > Who is going to make that decision to encourage this? Allow this? You?
>> > Me? Who? Right now, *nobody* is making such decisions and nobody can
>> > properly get away with saying they allow it. Leadership is a way to get
>> > out of it.
>>
>> I think open source in general has shown two things:
>>
>> 1. Communities can mostly take decisions without having official
>> authorities to do so. This is hyper democratic.
>> 2. When they can't, usually committees can't either. In those cases
>> somebody with a deciding vote is needed. This isn't democratic at all,
>> but efficient.
>
> Exactly. And that's what we currently don't have.
>
>> > +1, though a simple discouraging of utterance can't accomplish it by
>> > itself. What you need is active leadership that encourages such
>> > experimentation.
>>
>> I don't know about that. I agree with you that there hasn't been
>> active leadership for a while. But look what has happened without this
>> active leadership.
>> * We have two cool new Zope 3 based frameworks. One which throws out
>> the whole concept of ZCML for doing configuration by radical code
>> introspection, and as a result making the Zope Framework immensely
>> more accessible. And another one which experiments with revamping the
>> way Zope publishes things, and a related effort of rewriting the whole
>> publisher. Both frameworks have during these experimentation reached
>> big audiences and gained widespread if still experimental acceptance
>> in the community.
>
> True - but to me it seems that this happened because someone took leadership
> in this scenario.
>
>> * Zope 2 has been eggified.
>> * Buildout has totally massacred all other forms of deployment of Zope
>> projects.
>
> All that is true and very positive, but what has not happened and maybe never
> will that way, is the aggregation of all those Zope 3 efforts, documentation,
> website and the like. And that is something very important in order to
> attract a broader user base.
>
>> > Who decides to kill something off?
>>
>> If it doesn't get maintained, is dead. I guess you want somebody to
>> make it official. I'm not sure it's necessary in a component based
>> reality. With Zope 2 eggified for example, ZClasses gets a separate
>> module, and it lives as long as somebody maintains it. It's then just
>> a matter of deciding if it should be a part of the release or not,
>> which the release manager(s) decide.
>
> That's fine for one thing: Newbies don't know which packages are maintained
> and which are not. They find themselves confronted with a bunch of packages
> and don't know what they should use and what not. Example: zope.formlib vs.
> z3c.form.
> For instance, I decided to use lovely.remotetask - but I recognized that the
> last commit is quite some time ago and don't really know if it's actively
> used/maintained.

I'll chime in as a newbie.

It seems many of the comments preferring ad-hoc to structure
come from "we know what we are doing, we can take care of ourselves"

I think Zope has the goal of attracting new users, and the proposal
has potential to make Zope more inviting to the uninitiated.

Zope is very diffuse, making it a challenge to grasp. I know I would benefit
from any initiative which sought to provide an overview role.

Thanks,
Kent
>
>> > Who decides we should have a documentation website for a widely used
>> > component.
>>
>> Those who writes the documentation in question. :)
>
> In some way, that's already done - nearly every package has some doctest,
> which does often cover the package specifics very well. However, I remember
> the days I looked at z3c.form: I recognized that I needed to get to know the
> following other packages:
>
> - interfaces/adapters
> - z3c.pagelet
> - z3c.template
> - (and quite some more)
>
> This was very cumbersome.
>
>> > * who reminds us of necessary tasks and directions we're going into?
>> > Sometimes the community collectively decides on moving forward.
>> > Sometimes it doesn't. Are we really maintaining our issue tracker well,
>> > say?
>>
>> No, but then a person should get some sort of responsibility for that.
>> Note: A person. Not a committee. A committee means a bunch of people
>> are responsible, which is the same thing as saying that nobody is.
>
> Yes, that's probably true. So either this steering group is "a person" or has
> some person who decides.
>
> Best Regards,
> Hermann
>
> --
> hermann at qwer.tk
> GPG key ID: 299893C7 (on keyservers)
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