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

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi Tres,

You don't seem to get what I kept telling you over and over. I'm 
therefore going to be more blunt.

I don't want to use zope.app packages in Grok. Grok wants to get rid of 
zope.app packages. That's the very idea. We pushed this from the start. 
I spent a huge amount of time to make this possible, just like everyone 
else. But Grok isn't there yet. Neither are people who have to maintain 
Zope 3 apps.

But I have to use zope.app packages in Grok 1.1, because people need to 
have a way to move off zope.app in a working system. It will be the 
equivalent, I believe, of Zope 2.12, though the details are different. 
We cannot ask users to switch their imports in Grok 1.0, as there, for 
instance, zope.app.container is the only thing that exists. There is no 
zope.container yet to switch your imports to.

I am not asking you to help me maintain zope.app packages until the end 
of time. I'm asking you to help me support backwards compatibility code 
in zope.app for a while longer, until I and others have transitioned 
away from those packages as well.

If that code goes untested, it breaks. It already started breaking. 
Jan-Wijbrand noticed test failures on zope.app.exception, just checking 
it out from svn.zope.org. He didn't know a zope.publisher 3.12 was 
released that created this breakage. He didn't even pin down the ZTK or 
anything; it was just a checkout using the most recent releases. The 
person who makes the change in the original package is likely able to 
identify the cause for such breakage much more easily, and either warn 
people about what to do, or make a quick fix himself.

So I'm using zope.app packages, and changes happen in the zope.* subset, 
and zope.app packages are now breaking in SVN when buildouts are run.

Until recently Zope 2 used zope.app packages too, for backwards 
compatibility reasons. If the situation had been reversed and Grok had 
been off zope.app first, I don't think you would have been very happy if 
suddenly these started breaking as they became unmaintained.

Zope 2 is able to move off it more easily for a variety of reasons. Now 
that you're done, but we aren't yet, I am hearing a loud "screw you, 
we're done, we don't care about you anymore" from you.

That really pisses me off.

It's also just plain stupid if you only a little bit enlightened in your 
self-interest and want the ZTK to succeed and people outside the Zope 2 
community to use it. You're making that a lot harder. You're making my 
lots life harder for short-term selfish reasons. And it makes me really 
want to say "screw you too". But that would not be very enlightened.

Regards,

Martijn