[Zope-CMF] CMF Version Migration

Carl Rendell cer@sol43.com
Wed, 12 Dec 2001 09:54:16 -0800


I'm not sure if others have shared this experience, but my partner and I 
have run into issues with customizations we've done for CMF when migrating 
from one version (i.e. 1.0 to 1.1) to another.

In other application environments we've developed regression test suits or 
harnesses that flush out this sort of situation, and identify dependencies 
that need to be addressed before migration can be done.

I'd like to see a utility in Zope or CMF released with each new version, 
that allowed the webmaster or role responsible for the environment to 
exercise all of the methods, dtml, zpt, scripts, and so forth and give a 
report on their vulnerability to a version migration.

The error handling is pretty robust already, and would seem possible to 
catalog all of the executable items, exercise them, and capture the results 
(perhaps only the failures, but I like the idea of a full list for 
thoroughness) in a sort of report.

Right now it is 'port and fix' when moving from one version to another, and 
this makes the webmaster role vulnerable to the user asking for a quick 
port to take advantage of some new feature (I'm thinking corporate now), 
and the support folks scrambling to understand the impact of the change.

Any thoughts?


-----
Carl E. Rendell
Smoking Gnomes
Sr. Consultant                 |  "Ahh, the power of acquisition"
cer@sol43.com                  |                     - ChefZ
408.373.6866                   |