[Zope-dev] shrinking the ZTK: what happened (my perspective)

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

This is a summary of the previous discussions for those who weren't 
paying attention last week and don't want to read a huge thread coming 
back from vacations. I'm talking about you in particular, other steering 
group members. I'll spread it out over multiple short mails.

So what happened?

Hanno reduced the ZTK to a set of just zope.* packages. He removed the 
zope.app packages from the ZTK.

I was happy with losing zope.app, but not the way the zope.app packages 
were just unceremoniously removed from the ZTK without discussion. I 
didn't like the way that was done, so I reverted Hanno's change and 
added the packages back to the ZTK trunk.

I objected because of backwards compatibility concerns. Version 
information was being lost that was being maintained before. This 
information would be useful in both upgrading Zope 3 and Grok 
applications to the ZTK. (and I thought Zope 2 too at the time, but it 
is less of an issue there)

People responded in various ways:

* the ZTK isn't released yet and a discontinuity so there are no 
backwards compatibility concerns we need to care about.

* people maintaining Zope 3 or Grok applications, or the developers of 
these frameworks, should figure this out for themselves.

I responded that if the ZTK wants users it should help people cross the 
gap to it. That the ZTK has some responsibility to the transition from 
the past. Nobody seemed to feel that these arguments weighed very heavily.

Since I'm writing this summary, I'm of course still right. :)

Let me put that in other words: I believe have a legitimate concern that 
we could have solved pretty easily if we all weren't too busy trying to 
make points and being disgruntled.

Next, a point about what went wrong in the discussion. That's a 
meta-discussion, which are dangerous, but I think also valuable to a 
community like ours in transition.

Regards,

Martijn