[Zope3-dev] RFC: move 'App' out of 'Zope'

Phillip J. Eby pje@telecommunity.com
Sun, 22 Dec 2002 14:01:06 -0500


At 06:54 PM 12/21/02 -0500, Shane Hathaway wrote:

>Historically, Zope has many packages that might be reusable, but their
>actual use is limited almost entirely to Zope.  DocumentTemplate, for
>example, has no dependencies on the rest of Zope, but it's hardly useful
>unless you've committed to the full Zope framework.  So making
>DocumentTemplate a top-level package is premature generalization.

Wow.  I've been using DocumentTemplate outside of Zope for just shy of five 
years now.  Actually, at the time I started using it, "Zope" didn't exist 
and it was a stand-alone distributed package of Digital Creations.

Of course, whenever I sync it up to the more-or-less current Zope version, 
it usually takes a fair amount of fiddling with the precise checkout tags, 
and/or patching to get it to work again.  Strangely, in between Zope 2.x 
releases, there are points at which it works fine, but usually actual 
releases are broken for use outside Zope.  Don't ask me why.


>I guess in my mind the choice to make a top-level package corresponds
>directly with the maturity of the package.  Zope 3's security framework,
>for example, is not well enough understood to make it a t.l.p., and if it
>ever becomes one, its interface is likely to change to meet the needs of
>applications other than Zope.
>
>So I would envision zodb, interface, and page templates as top-level
>packages.  Most of the other packages aren't mature enough.

Throw in ZPublisher and DocumentTemplate, and I'd probably agree with you, 
since I've been using both of the latter externally since the summer of 
'98, and both were separately distributed prior to the existence of "Zope 
1.0".  Actually, I wouldn't swear to it, but I think the Interface package 
goes *almost* that far back, too.