[Zope3-Users] Visionaire! (All your problems, solved)

[Chris McDonough]

On Mar 2, 2006, at 6:41 AM, Peter Bengtsson wrote:

> I'm with Max on this one.
>
> What's the point? To save a few megabytes of harddisk space?
> If you don't want the zope.bobo part of your zope3, ignore it. You
> don't have to use it if you don't want to.
>
> ...
> Let's keep it simple, bundle it all in one fat package and ignore the
> excessive zmi files that gets thrown in.

That's a reasonable position; Zope 2 has really done well under this  
model.  But one of Zope's historical problems been that no two people  
have the same vision of what that "one fat package" should actually  
do.  Is it a content management system?  An app server?  A collection  
of Python packages?  It's all of those things to some level or  
another, but it's hard to "keep it tidy" when the huge package is  
being pulled in all of those directions.  It's be easier to compose  
the big package out of smaller, independently-maintained bits.  It's  
not just "excessive ZMI files" that clutter things up, cross-package  
dependencies creep in because nobody can tell what the boundaries  
are, and then it's impossible to not distribute the whole huge  
honking tarball.

It's also important to let the good parts of Zope thrive naturally on  
their own and let the bad parts die, and in order for this to happen  
they need to be packaged independently.  Zope 2 was *meant* to be a  
collection of smaller packages that could work outside of Zope-the- 
framework, but because of packaging issues, only a few things  
actually do work well outside (ZPT and ZODB).

- C