[Zope3-dev] Package is the wrong name for the things I called "Zope Packages".

[seb bacon]

Shane Hathaway wrote:
> seb bacon wrote:
> 
>> Why do we need to 'close' a workspace at all?  Is it just a state 
>> which indicates that the source is pristine or of a release standard?
> 
> Yes.  Nothing more.  It's quite valuable, too. :-)

I think that it's not valuable enough...

> But interpretation by end users matters more than implementation, of 
> course.  Still, it would seem strange to me for an object to morph into 
> something else just because I toggle a boolean attribute.

True.

The process of reaching a release point is more than just a mental 
toggle, though.  Should it really feel that easy?  What about two 
developers toggling it at the same time?  Or one developer toggling it 
10 times a day in order to make some incremental changes?  It is likely 
that real-world use would require varying numbers of states.  It begins 
to sound a bit like a version control system.

I wonder if they should just be "workspaces" (or "bundles" or whatever) 
and we should defer the question of their state to a versioning service. 
  Distribution will be handled by a distribution service which will only 
allow you to distribute workspaces which are in a certain state, such as 
'locked'.

>> ...  I would be suprised if much of the installed user base thinks 
>> of a "product" as anything other than "an optional piece of software 
>> you download and install which makes Zope do useful stuff"

> A product also:
> 
> - is a Python package
> - registers meta_types
> - runs unrestricted
> - gets initialized at each Zope startup
> - can monkey-patch
> - contains Python code
> - usually gets compressed as a tarfile
> - is located under a directory called Products
> - can hold ZClasses
> - shows up in the control panel

But all these examples are only relevant to developers of some flavour. 
  I think the installed user base is at most interested in the lat two 
items, and in general not even those.

> Any of these assumptions (and others) may be broken in the future.  The 
> first assumption is what led to the whole confusion about "persistent 
> packages" vs. "Zope packages", in fact.

I guess that maybe 80% of Zope users would come up with a definition 
like mine ("an optional piece of software you download and install which 
makes Zope do useful stuff").  *That* would continue to be a valid 
description of BundleWorkspacePackages in the future.

Having said all that, I'm not too bothered about the term 'Product'.  It 
just seems a pity to throw away an old friend without being clear about 
the reasons :-)

We definitely need that big survey of "most zope users", it seems...

seb