[Zope] Common issue: Maintainance of Zope products

[Tille, Andreas]

Hello,

while it is a profit for Zope that there is a lot of products for the
different tasks I found out that there is quite a number of those packages
which render unusable under certain Zope / Python versions, are unmaintained,
undocumented or in a bad state.

Examples:
 - LocalFS (see the discussions in the mailing lists) which in the end
   leads to patches which are out of control of the main Zope repository
   http://www.easyleading.org/easyhome/index_html?content=downloadsLocalFS
 - TinyTable and TinyTablePlus (I tried to clear some issues about it
   on this list and per mail to the authors but did never got any answer)
 - ...

This is not a good reputation for Zope if users face this problem.

Suggested solution for Zope Corp.:
  Just look at Debian organisation:  There is a maintainer for every
  package.  If a maintainer wants to stop maintainance (which seems to
  be tha case for some of Zope products) he is obliged to declare to
  orphan the package.  If there is no volunteer for the package in
  question there is a Quality Assurance team which cares for bugs/
  enhancements/new versions.
  This is organized via the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS).
  Please note that a software product without a person which feels
  responsible will sooner or later die and it would be a shame if this
  would happen for a number of Zope products.

  In my opinion Zope really needs such kind of BTS as any other big
  OS project.  The homepage of each packages should contain a link
  to the list of bugs of this package to have a central repository.
  People who like to provide patches could send them to the BTS and
  so they will not be lost in space for further development.

In my opinion this would really enhance the quality of Zope products and
will attract even more users.

Kind regards

         Andreas.