[Zope-dev] Zope 2.13 roadmap

[Marius Gedminas]

On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 02:47:36PM +0200, Hanno Schlichting wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Marius Gedminas <marius at gedmin.as> wrote:
> > I don't think I'll be able to work on it, but I think it's worth
> > consideration: Unicode issues with Zope 2.12.  I've seen these on at
> > least three different Zope 2 sites built with a combination of TTW page
> > templates, Python scripts and (sometimes) DTML documents: things like
> > title attributes store their data as UTF-8 strings, while page templates
> > insist on Unicode objects, resulting in errors all over the place.
> >
> > Those sites worked with Zope 2.9 and broke down after an upgrade to
> > 2.12.  That's a not very nice thing to do to your users...
> 
> They broke down after the move to Zope 2.10.

Probably; the sites I helped upgrade skipped over 2.10 and 2.11.

> We switched Zope 2 to
> using the zope.tal / zope.tales packages in favor of Zope 2's own
> implementation. As a result TAL uses Unicode internally ever since.
> There's the whole unicoderesolver story, which allows you to implement
> an application specific fallback story. We decided back then, that
> dealing with this problem would be left to each application, as Zope 2
> in general has too little knowledge about your data - and nobody
> volunteered to do any work on it ;)

What if there's no application, just a Zope 2 website, using TTW
scripts for implementing things like navigation menus?

E.g. Page Templates come with a 'title' property of type string, not
ustring, and there are big fat bold warnings not to delete it, which
would be a prerequisite for creating an ustring version.

> If you have a rather large application with third-party plugins and
> have to deal with the encoded string to Unicode conversion, I think
> such a long term upgrade story with policy changes happening around
> major releases is the only way to go. If you have a pure-inhouse
> application you can do a data and code conversion as single project
> and get over with.

How can I do a data conversion when the data in question is owned and
managed by core Zope 2 objects, that can't agree on a common data format
(string versus unicode)?

Marius Gedminas
-- 
http://pov.lt/ -- Zope 3 consulting and development
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