[Zope-dev] shrinking the ZTK: a proposed solution

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi,

> So here's my proposed solution for the ZTK shrinking issue:
>
> The ZTK branch 'faassen-smaller' contains Hanno's smaller ZTK. Since
> Zope 2 forked the ZTK in response and continued to make changes to their
> fork, I've tried to keep it in sync with the Zope 2 fork.
>
> I've created a new 'zopeapp' package that expands the ZTK with zope.app.
> packages in my sandbox. This extracts that information from the ZTK.
>
> Hopefully after we get some feedback from other steering group members
> (very silent indeed in the holiday period when all this happened) we can
> make these two projects the official one: a ZTK project and a zopeapp
> project.

+1

I think we do need to start being a bit more explicit about who these 
people are, though, or (I think more reasonably, at least in the short 
term) acknowledge that really there's one community: the Zope one; and 
various *audiences*. Documenting that somewhere (and possibly letting 
people indicate their interest in one or more audiences and one or more 
sub-projects, like ZTK vs. ZopeApp) would at least help us make sure 
that we had all points of view represented.

> A few things I ask the ZTK maintainers:
>
> I ask the ZTK maintainers to have the same concern for the zope.app
> packages as for any other user of the ZTK: work to support zopeapp's
> compatibility with the ZTK. If the zopeapp maintainers have issues,
> listen to them seriously. I think everybody can agree that this is
> within the ZTK mandate for the time being, as zopeapp clearly exists and
> is being used by a significant amount of people. (I'd like to work to
> retire it by making it used by far less people)
>
> I also strongly encourage the ZTK maintainers to consider the situation
> of backwards compatibility seriously. Help people transition from their
> code now to the ZTK. Helping everybody migrate to the ZTK smoothly
> increases the value of the ZTK itself. Obviously I cannot *force* ZTK
> maintainers to worry about this. Instead I'm appealing to your
> self-interest. And of course the transition burden is shared and should
> not fall solely or even predominantly on the ZTK maintainers.
>
> I also think we as ZTK maintainers should better consider the concerns
> of other users of the ZTK. In this case, Zope 2 had less of a concern
> for zope.app than Grok or Zope 3. I didn't even understand this until
> the debate was further along. The concerns of others should be
> considered as well instead of simply rejected. We usually can find ways
> to balance the concerns of everybody. To that end concerns (or lack
> thereof) should be clearly communicated and be listened to.

+1 to all of that.

Martin

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