[Zope-dev] Uses of the ZTK and how it relates to management

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Christian Theune <ct at gocept.com> wrote:
> A thought that came up when reading this paragraph: another option
> restructuring/grouping to reduce the amount of packages may be to join
> smaller packages with weird boundaries into larger ones again. (Not that
> I suggest this to be an ultimate option, nor do I know from the top of
> my head any candidates for this, but we can keep that on the list of
> options we have.)

I think this is a good idea, but I wouldn't want to do it on a package
level. Rather do it on the distribution level. Once the distutils2
improvements are available, we have the means to say "distribution A
obsoletes B".

As a simple example that would allow us to put zope.event into the
zope.component distribution, without having to change any import paths
or setup.py install_requires lines. The zope.component distribution
would have the metadata to say "I obsolete zope.event", so if someone
has such a version of zope.component, requirements of the zope.event
distribution would be automatically satisfied.

This same method could be taken to build more functional distribution
out of related packages we have today. These distributions might also
be easier to market, document and explain. But they come with the
downside of more buy-in per distribution. Figuring out how packages
are actually used and which ones are used independently is no small
task.

Hanno