[Zope] Re: Does anyone care whether we deprecate ZClasses?

[Jim Fulton]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On the Paris sprint, one thing that was noted was how ironic it was
> that the release of 2.8, which includes support for the new
> recommended development paradigm, was held up becuase we neeeded to
> support an old non-recommended one. :-)

It boils down to backward compatibility.  Backward compatibility
is important.  People aren't going to use our platform if it keeps
changing. in backward incompatible ways without reletively smooth
transition tools.  We can't simply drop such a critical feature
just because we don't want to maintain it.  Heck, I'd love to
drop version support from ZODB, but I'm not going to until I
can offer a replacement to the people who depend on versions
today.

> 
> Anyway, my main question is: You who are using ZClasses, can't you
> just stay on Zope2.8 or 2.9, if Zope 2.10 would not contain ZClass
> support? The main features of 2.8 is support for the component
> architecture,

For many people, the main features of 2.8 are multi-version concurrency
control and better garbage collection.

 > and for zope 2.9 and 2.10 this will be even more true:
> there will most likely be very few new features besides this.

I wouldn't assume that.  People continue to do interesting things
on this platform.  In any case, if we put people in the place
where they couldn't (in a practical, rather than theoretical sense)
migrate from a particular version, then we'd have to consider
maintaining that version longer that we otherwise would, if only to
give people bug fixes (especially security fixes).

 > With 2.9
> or 2.10 the idea is that you can use both  ZClasses, *and* write
> products that work under Zope3. I'm not even sure there will be a
> 2.10, and in any case you won't really have much need of it.

I'd be very surprised if there was not a Zope 2.10, or even a Zope 2.11.

Jim
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