[Zope-dev] Zope Toolkit - no more releases

[Hanno Schlichting]

Hi.

A while back Gocept graciously hosted the first of a series of Zope
Resurrection sprints (now they have to host more *wink*). At the sprint
we had a discussion about the status of the Zope Toolkit. Both
Jan-Wijbrand and me where present as two of the members of the old ZTK
release team.

At the meeting we discussed whether or not it would continue to make
sense to "release" the ZTK as we had done in the past. The conclusion
from the meeting was, that there is little to no benefit of doing ZTK
releases anymore.

Both Zope2 and Grok have long since forked and maintain their own
versions of a ZTK versions list. Applications built directly on top of
the ZTK tend to use the current ZTK versions list as a starting point,
but fork and maintain their own versions as well. And the ZTK itself has
matured and is very stable, so there aren't many version conflicts
across ZTK libraries anymore, which would warrant tracking compatible
version combinations.

With that said, there is still value in testing all the ZTK libraries in
one place, so the zopetoolkit project on github [1] still provides some
value. We would like to encourage anyone doing a new release of a ZTK
library, to also provide a pull request against the zopetoolkit project
(for example [2]), so we get a travis-ci test run for the ZTK as a
whole.

As an alternative you can also still use the zopetoolkit project to
develop and test a library before doing a release, by following the
relevant instructions [3].

At the sprint I took a stab at updating the ZTK docs [4], so they aren't
completely out-of-date anymore. But there are certainly still outdated
sections in there, so any help is welcome to update them. A final thanks
goes to Jim, who put in a redirect, so the old
http://docs.zope.org/zopetoolkit site now redirect to
https://zopetoolkit.readthedocs.io.

Hanno

[1] https://github.com/zopefoundation/zopetoolkit
[2] https://github.com/zopefoundation/zopetoolkit/pull/6
[3] https://zopetoolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/process/buildbots.html
[4] https://zopetoolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/