[Zope2-migration] FYI: Lessons from Kai Wu at ArsDigita

[Paul Everitt]

On Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003, at 11:13 Europe/Paris, seb bacon wrote:

> Paul Everitt wrote:
>> On Tuesday, Feb 11, 2003, at 10:52 Europe/Paris, seb bacon wrote:
>>>
>>> All of Kai Wu's observations suggest this route to me:
>>>
>>>  - make some crystal clear, highly visible statements that Zope3
>>>    is an R&D effort, without a release date, from the front page
>>>    of zope.org
>>>  - get Zope 3 to beta quality without any fanfares
>>>  - write developer and user manuals
>>>  - set up a new mailing list for the more casual users as soon as
>>>    possible (zope3 at zope.org)
>>>  - release perhaps 10 really useful products / plugins / whatever 
>>> we're
>>>    going to call them
>>>  - get installers working smoothly (windows, rpms, debs, etc)
>>>  - *ONLY THEN* do we set a release date for the full Zope3 beta, make
>>>    press releases, spam mailing lists
>> How would you handle the release of Zope 3x in that sequence?
>
> I'm only thinking of Zope 3x.  Zope3.0 would come some time after.
>
> Ughh, having just made my point about Zope names (see other mail), I 
> have just realised what a truly terrible, confusing naming convention 
> we have developed!
>
> Zope 2.x == Any Zope released before Zope3.0
> Zope 3.x == A complete, usable Zope without backwards compatibility
> Zope 3.0 == The successor to Zope 2.x
>
> (or something like that)
>
> That is a marketing person's nightmare!
>
> Come to think of it, why do we need a public release of Zope 3.x at 
> all?

I'm worried about a public release of Zope 3x, but for different 
reasons.  I'm pretty convinced that the interest level in migration 
machinery won't be a popular itch amongst the itch-scratchers.  As Kai 
said: "... translating software plumbing is a nauseating task for
smart programmers, ..."

One way to mitigate this risk: decree that there won't be a production 
release of Zope 3x until after the first successful migration is 
performed in a testing environment.

For instance, once the Zope 3 team can migrate zope.org to Zope 3 in a 
test environment, then we can be convinced that migration is possible.

--Paul