Recent discussions make it obvious to me that we need to come to terms with Zope 3 releases.
I have some ideas and observations. I don't have decisions at this point. We need to make some decisions as a community, with me hopefully helping at times to get us unstuck. :)
- The classic 3.4 release seems to be stalled. This was to be a release modeled on previous Zope 3 releases. It provides a monolithic Zope 3 application. I expect that it is stalled because the person who volunteered to see it through overcommitted and, more importantly, it isn't of much practical use, except as a testing platform or as some sort of known good configuration. The original rational was that we didn't want to be too disruptive in the next release. I think we've been overtaken by events and a lack of interested resources.
- There is a desperate need for a known good configuration of components that work well together and that people can build on without having to think too hard about the underlying platform.
- There is a need for a mechanism for testing "core" components to make sure they don't cause breakage.
- We need to decide what Zope 3 is. Zope 3 is *not* an application. I think there is fairly broad agreement on that. I can think of several words that could be used to describe what it *is*, like "platform", "environment", "ecosystem". I think it's time we came up with the elevator speech for what Zope 3 is. It should be a few sentences at most. It need not be carved in stone forever, but it should be agreed on and used for tactical planning. This should probably go hand in hand with the bigger definition of what Zope is along the lines of the ideas that Tres expressed at the DZUG in Potsdam.
- We need to decide what a Zope 3 release is (or maybe multiple flavors). I favor copying the linux experiences, but have an open mind.
- We need a *realistic* (especially wrt available resources) process for managing releases. There are 2 aspects of this. We shouldn't make plans for which there aren't enough resources. We also shouldn't plan significant tasks that people won't care enough to work on. I think the classic Zope 3.4 release is a good example of a large effort that really wouldn't benefit many people, if any.
Jim -- Jim Fulton Zope Corporation _______________________________________________ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
