[Zope-dev] CatalogPathAwareness and zope.lifecycle

[William Heymann]

On Friday 15 April 2011, Hanno Schlichting wrote:
> 
> I don't think there's any examples. Documentation for developing with
> current Zope 2 is virtually non-existant.
> 

How are people expected to upgrade to new code that replaces the old 
functionality if there is no documentation for it? What is the justification 
for removing the old code if there is no real viable upgrade path? Is the old 
code causing problems?

> > I assume this kind of thing has been discussed and the decision has been
> > taken on judging backwards compatibility vs. the benefits of doing this?
> 
> The particular code was unused for several years, using manage_*
> methods is deprecated since Zope 2.8 or 2.9.
> 

It may have been marked as deprecated for a long time but no actual docs on 
what to switch to or how to do it instead so that is not really an upgrade 
path.

> If you really need this code, just copy it from an old release into
> your own codebase.
> 
> Developing with Zope 2 is probably a frustrating experience, but that
> shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The project is dead for
> several years now and is only kept left alive while Plone is migrating
> away from it or some long time developers are still using it. It's a
> large piece of legacy code that has no future - certainly not for new
> users or developers not already familiar with it.
> 

Zope 2.x is only recently been a frustrating experience with features being 
removed or changed. However even with all of that zope is pretty much one the 
most reliable and flexible system I can think of. Zope 2.x is still very easy 
to plug things into and acquisition and traversal are massively powerful. 

There still don't seem to be any other frameworks that actually take security 
remotely seriously.

So what is the future of zope 2.x? Is any feature that plone does not use to 
be removed with no documentation until plone no longer needs zope 2.x and then 
zope 2.x will just be discarded? What about developers who build on zope 2.x 
and use it very successfully, what should they switch to?

Zope 2.13 represented a pretty major upgrade for zope users. Threaded zeo was 
a huge improvement. I have done a lot of testing recently against relstorage 
running postgres and memcached vs 2.13 zeo and even under 1000 concurrent 
connections zeo was faster, more reliable and used less memory.

It just seems that there is a real effort to make zope 2.x hostile for people 
to continue to use. Like we are not wanted and should just move to something 
else. Zope 2.x is still an amazing product and with some work I believe it 
could be a major player again since it can still do many extremely useful 
things that other frameworks can not even approach.

If someone did migrate to plone will that be a stable development target with 
documentation on how to handle upgrades when features are deprecated? Will 
plone keep the security system of zope 2.x or something like it? Is plone open 
to changes to speed up usage of the system?