[Zope-dev] Zope 2.13 - next steps

[Hanno Schlichting]

Hi there,

we had an initial roadmap discussion back in March
(https://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2010-March/039915.html).
Some things have changed since then, so it's time for an update.

The big picture:

Zope 2.12.0 final was released October 1, 2009 - the first alpha back
in February 2009. A lot of time has passed since then and we have made
quite a number of changes to Zope2 in the meantime.

Plone 4.0 is getting ever more delayed and is still in late beta.
Based on the current speed it will be another two years until there's
a final 5.0 release of Plone. This is far too long for not having a
Zope 2 release.

So I talked to Eric Steele as the Plone 4.x release manager and a
couple of people in the community. There is general agreement that
updating to a Zope 2.13 release for Plone 4.1 is a sensible approach.
Plone 4.1 has an approximate release of sometime in six to nine
months.

The plan:

Aim for having a Zope 2.13 release in time for Plone 4.1, get a first
alpha release out by the end of the month or early July. We can have
more alpha releases during the summer, a beta probably around the
zope-dev summit / German Zope User Group conference in early
September.

What do we have in Zope 2.13:

- zope.app removal
- moving formlib out of the core into five.formlib

- WSGI - thx to Tres and some help from the Plone Symposium East
sprint, we have native WSGI support in Zope 2 now. Probably can use
some polishing, more testing and documentation - perfect tasks for
alpha releases and larger community involvement.

- ZTK - The ZTK release team is getting close to having a first ZTK
1.0 alpha release out. I'm confident Zope 2.13 can be based on an
official ZTK release.

- Five deprecation - I did a whole bunch of work here and I consider
it good enough for a next step. There's always more to do, but there's
enough already in this release.

- Reduce C code in Zope 2 - I made good progress on this.
AccessControl has almost no Zope2 dependencies anymore and
DocumentTemplate is cleaned up. Some more work can be done during the
alpha releases and we can probably finish this one.

- ZODB 3.10 - Current Zope 2 trunk is already using a 3.10 beta
release. I talked to Jim and he's confident to get a final release out
in a matter of two to three months or so.

That's quite a bit already. Support for Python 2.7 is blocking on the
RestrictedPython security review for the most part, Python 3 support
is not on the radar.

I hope we get some more changes from Martin Aspeli's work on
plone.(app.)testing and a new more modular testing infrastructure.
There's a bunch of stuff in the startup process and ZCML loading that
can be cleaned up.

In order to make this story more appealing, I spent the last two
weekends on cleaning up CMF and Plone and making it compatible with
current Zope trunk. As of this moment all tests of CMF and Plone pass
on Zope trunk. The changes are minimal and backwards compatible, so
they are also in the stable releases. This means both CMF 2.2.1 and
Plone 4.0 beta5 are going to be fully compatible with Zope trunk.

Comments, suggestions, more work you'd like to get into 2.13?

Cheers,
Hanno