[Zope-dev] moving the zope.app.* packages out of the ZTK: towards a plan

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Fred Drake wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Martijn Faassen <faassen at startifact.com> wrote:
>> Let me sketch out some ideas for a plan:
[snip]
>> * we make sure we have a way to regularly run the zopeapp tests in
>> conjunction with the ZTK.
> 
> -1 (not the problem of the ZTK maintainers; anyone who cares can start
> from the machinery used for the ZTK, if they exist)

[snip]

>> * we also release zopeapp 1.0 in conjunction with it. This is just a
>> backwards compatibility KGSish thing. We explicitly don't strive to
>> document it, etc.
> 
> -1 (again, not the problem for the ZTK maintainers; let's let someone
> who cares worry about what constitutes "1.0" or any other release)

[snip]
>> Note that we also have a long-standing idea of a "wider KGS" which
>> contains the ZTK plus perhaps zopeapp plus more, such as z3c.form. This
>> is a related exercise.
> 
> Again, this isn't a ZTK issue, but a consideration for those
> interested in those higher-level projects.

I agree with these -1, but only from the perspective of the future, not 
from the perspective of the transition we're in. These are ZTK issues 
only in as much as that these are issues of the users of the ZTK, just 
like any other users of the ZTK. The ZTK developers should not have to 
maintain other KGSes.

>> Once we have some discussion we can hopefully flesh out this plan, put
>> in some dates and such, and put the plan in the Zope Toolkit documentatino.
> 
> -1 (such projects should not be incorporated into the ZTK project)

This is a problem for the zope-dev community, which includes the ZTK 
maintainers. So however we want to make responsible, as a zope-dev 
community we are still responsible.

I will now argue why I think this is a particular responsibility for the 
ZTK maintainers at this time. This is because it is a transition problem.

I am assuming that the ZTK maintainers want to attract users to the ZTK. 
One important class of users is the existing users we have of libraries 
in this toolkit. In fact this is realistically speaking almost all the 
people on the ZTK in the near future, until we vastly improve documentation.

It makes sense to help these people to transition onto the ZTK, as the 
ZTK without users is pointless.

So I'm proposing we incorporate the zopeapp project as a project with an 
*explicitly limited responsibility* within the ZTK project *for a 
limited period of time*, during the phase of transition, to assist 
people to upgrade to use the ZTK within their project.

After the transition phase, which we should clearly communicate, the ZTK 
maintainers have a responsibility to the zopeapp project in the same way 
as they have a responsibility to other projects that use the ZTK. So, 
after the transition, zopeapp will cease to be a special responsibility 
for the ZTK maintainers.

If we really care about not making ZTK maintainers responsible for this 
in any way, we could instead create a special "transition" project out 
of this, but that seems overkill. We could also relegate it to the 
inactive Zope 3 development community we were trying to fix in the first 
place..

Regards,

Martijn