[Zope] Zope support through the community: sorting

[Dieter Maurer]

Zopistas,

there is currently a heaty and controversial debate at

      http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ExtendedDTMLSorting

It is concerned with Oleg's great "Sorting Patch"
that provides (almost) general, easy to use sorting facilities all over
Zope's framework (DTML, Python Scripts, External Methods, ZPT, ....).

There seems to be danger that this great support through a community
member will have a fate similar to Tino's "in" patch:

  that the incorporation into the Zope core is far too long
  delayed because important DC people fear "feature bloat".


If you are interested in sorting along the lines

  * case sensitive/insensitive
  * ascending/descending
  * locale aware
  * multi-column

you should go to the above site and voice your opinion.


As a general note:

  It seems to me that DC is far too reluctant to accept
  contributions to Zope from community members:

     * patches fixing bugs
     * patches implementing missing but useful features

  In my view
  
    * bug fixing patches should always be accepted
      unless the patch is not easily understandable.

    * feature patches should be accepted, if it
      makes Zope more consistent (as
      the upcoming "urlparam_expr" patch)
      or easier to use (as Oleg's sorting patch
      or Tino's in patch).

  Great reluctance towards these contributions risks Zope
  to lose community support.

  I can tell from experience the frustration caused by DC
  ignoring contributions.

    I invested considerable time to file several important ZCatalog
    bug reports with patches into the collector for Zope 2.1.6,
    just to see them ignored in all versions of Zope 2.2.
    Only for Zope 2.3.1, the issues have been addressed.

    I still advice people to file bug reports and patches into
    the Collector, but personnaly I already start to think
    whether it is worth the effort....


Dieter