[Zope] Happy Valentine's Day from Zwiki HQ

[Simon Michael]

Hello Zopistas.. a happy Valentine's day to all!

Continuing with my spring cleaning theme over at 
http://zwiki.org/GeneralDiscussion , here are some musings.

Like many of you, I'm always wondering where is the most useful place to 
spend my community hacking time. Sometimes Zwiki seems like the very 
best place; other times it doesn't. Development pretty much came to a 
full stop at times last year. So I'm kicking around some ideas.

I'm pondering what slows down my Zwiki hacking.
First, let me get one thing off my chest: for me, Python is a `blub 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blub>`_! There, I said it. Moving on.. 
then, there are the usual questions of project and platform maturity, 
legacy cruft, how many people actually use this thing, what is the 
benefit, what's the future potential, etc.  Don't get me wrong, I expect 
Python and Zope 2 to keep growing and succeeding for a very long time. 
And so I guess Zwiki will continue to be used and perhaps grow in user 
base. At the current rate of development, though, we will not stay 
competitive with other software or even catch up with our own bug 
reports. Looking at current code, I am reminded that Zwiki 0.x is 
mature, built on early zope 2 architecture, and that cleanup continues 
to be expensive (compared to starting something fresh).

Of course, many hands make light work. Imagine ten developers working on 
Zwiki at once - cleanup expense would no longer be noticeable, we could 
pretty much do whatever we want. That's not our current reality. Is it 
possible to find ten Zwiki developers now or in future ? I'm sure I 
could increase our numbers (from two active) by sustained effort, but 
how far and how smart a strategy that is I don't know.

Another idea which inspired this post is to branch, mothballing 0.x 
as-is and moving development focus to a Zwiki 2.x where we would do 
aggressive disruptive cleanup. Say we did that. What would you throw out 
of Zwiki 0.x ? What would you keep ?

This is to air these thoughts, solicit your ideas, and also a kind of 
ping to gauge support for the project circa 2008, I guess.

Warm regards - Simon

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