[Zope] What causes the community to stall so often?

[Oliver Bleutgen]

Ron Arts wrote:
[snip]

> 1. Difficult installation.
> 
> Most people want to install a binary package these days (in practice
> this means RPM). When you look at the downloads, you see that the latest
> RPM is not the most recent Zope version. Oops! I thought, is this a
> serious product? (Please note: this first impression is important)
> 
> Another thing: how to install? PCGI? ZServer? There is no recommended
> way. Documentation is sparse on this matter.
> 
> The windows install is good, but you're missing most of the opensource
> community if the unix/linux people don't install zope. And many
> people *only* install rpm (if only for easy removal).

I have a completely different opinion on that matter.
Making rpms is a real hell for software which depends anything else, at
least as far as I can see in opensource land.

OSS projects delivering _no_ rpms (other than from third parties) include:
linux kernel, php, kde, apache httpd, perl, python ...
In fact I don't know any project which takes the maintainance burden and 
even tries to deliver rpms, and nearly all of the above state the same 
reasons I do for not providing rpms.

Zope-x.y.z-src's difference to nearly all of them is that it doesn't 
touch any files/directorys outside the directory you unpack it in.
So removing zope from a system is as easy as rm -rf yourzopepath/ .

Zope is included in all major distributions, it just has the problem, 
which is hopefully temporary, that it's dependencies on python-x.y.z 
change too fast.
 From an outside view, it seems that the development process of python 
itself is responsible for that.

I really don't think that people not being able to comprehend
tar xvfz zope-2.n.n-src.tar.gz
python wo_pcgi.py
start

will have much fun with zope, anyway. And I strongly doubt these people 
are the unix/linux users of the "opensource community".


> 
> 2. Unclear direction.
> 
> When I started browsing www.zope.org and all the dopcumentation,
> I came about three confusing differences: DTML, ZAL, and Zope3.
> It all was unclear to me, and if I will build a site in Zope I
> don't want to be on a dead trail. It is unclear to me which route
> I should take.

You are right, OTOH there were some statements here on some lists which 
did cover some topics of compatiblity of zope3 etc. Also, using google
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=%22zope+3%22+dtml+%22zope+2%22

yields the following link at the third place:
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2001-December/014313.html


> 3. downloadable product list.
> 
> Many products I downloaded did not work with my zope 2.5.0. ZopeGUD
> is broken. I could not even create an RPM for ZMySQLDA, even though
> I asked around on this list. So I still don't have MySQL access.
> Other products are listed as unmaintained. Why are they still on the
> list? Also there are duplicate products. The difference between
> them is not outlined, and nothing is recommended. Are some products
> far superior to others even though they seem to accomplish the same
> thing? I am forced to find out myself.

Yes, you are. Without adding the usual "unless you pay for it, that's 
open source" flamefest-attractor, I think it might be worth considering 
some technical helpers to mitigate some of these problems.

Perhaps making products discussable on zope.org. Or adding some sort of 
a "compability feedback form", which automatically lists all existing 
zope versions (and OS variations, this is another problem) and people 
could post if it [works,doesn't work,needs small modifications to work}. 
These feedbacks should be counted, naturally, because individuals might 
make other mistakes etc.

cheers,
oliver