[Zope-dev] shrinking the ZTK: a proposed solution

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

So here's my proposed solution for the ZTK shrinking issue:

The ZTK branch 'faassen-smaller' contains Hanno's smaller ZTK. Since 
Zope 2 forked the ZTK in response and continued to make changes to their 
fork, I've tried to keep it in sync with the Zope 2 fork.

I've created a new 'zopeapp' package that expands the ZTK with zope.app. 
packages in my sandbox. This extracts that information from the ZTK.

Hopefully after we get some feedback from other steering group members 
(very silent indeed in the holiday period when all this happened) we can 
make these two projects the official one: a ZTK project and a zopeapp 
project.

A few things I ask the ZTK maintainers:

I ask the ZTK maintainers to have the same concern for the zope.app 
packages as for any other user of the ZTK: work to support zopeapp's 
compatibility with the ZTK. If the zopeapp maintainers have issues, 
listen to them seriously. I think everybody can agree that this is 
within the ZTK mandate for the time being, as zopeapp clearly exists and 
is being used by a significant amount of people. (I'd like to work to 
retire it by making it used by far less people)

I also strongly encourage the ZTK maintainers to consider the situation 
of backwards compatibility seriously. Help people transition from their 
code now to the ZTK. Helping everybody migrate to the ZTK smoothly 
increases the value of the ZTK itself. Obviously I cannot *force* ZTK 
maintainers to worry about this. Instead I'm appealing to your 
self-interest. And of course the transition burden is shared and should 
not fall solely or even predominantly on the ZTK maintainers.

I also think we as ZTK maintainers should better consider the concerns 
of other users of the ZTK. In this case, Zope 2 had less of a concern 
for zope.app than Grok or Zope 3. I didn't even understand this until 
the debate was further along. The concerns of others should be 
considered as well instead of simply rejected. We usually can find ways 
to balance the concerns of everybody. To that end concerns (or lack 
thereof) should be clearly communicated and be listened to.

Regards,

Martijn