[ZWeb] Reopening the Plone issue -- but not here, please

[Guido van Rossum]

I have to admit a mistake.  I thought that there was a good reason why
Sidnei's contract for the NZO work says "no Plone", and that I was
simply too dumb to understand it, so I defended it by using authority
instead of reason.  But after I pushed back, I've found what appears
to be the real reason.  Now we can go back to arguing about it.

The reason why Zope Corp is not super-keen on having the site run on
Plone is one of support.  Once Sidnei has delivered the site and is
retired, when the site dies at 3am, whose beeper goes off?  Not mine,
but that of some poor schmuck of a Zope Corp sysadmin, who will
attempt to fix the problem.  When there's a problem with the Zope
software that he can't solve on his own, who gets called at 4am?  Not
me, but someone else at Zope Corp who knows a lot about Zope.  This
guy doesn't know anything about Plone, but he knows CMF.  If (God
forbid) the problem is caused by something that Plone does differently
than CMF, he's stuck.

But there area ways to deal with this, and I now think that we can be
much more rational about this decision.  I've talked this over with
Sidnei, and he agrees.  His suggestion is to take this to another
list, since zope-web is only a small (albeit oh-so vocal :-) fraction
of the Zope community.  I'm all for it, but I'd like to stay out of it
myself, as long as the above support concern is somehow addressed.
(One way to address it would be to promise that the site will still
work if the Plone stuff is removed, leaving standard CMF stuff.)

I'll task Sidnei with raising the issue in an appropriate list.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)