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

[Shane Hathaway]

seb bacon wrote:
> 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.

Closing doesn't imply a release point.  Versioning is independent.

Opening/closing is meant to solve the same problem that CMF skins were 
designed to solve: it's hard to distinguish local changes from external 
software changes.  CMF skins solved it by putting external software in a 
place that users can't change through the ZMI.  It worked, but it was 
draconian and strongly discouraged TTW development.  Opening/closing 
turns the decision of whether you are an end user or a developer into a 
simple state change.  You choose to develop on the filesystem, but 
you're no longer forced to.

> 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'.

That's a possibility, but versioning and distribution services aren't 
necessary.  Here's my main use case: in the future, I download Swishdot 
and install it.  I make some local changes and run a web site.  Chris 
Withers, the author of Swishdot, sees the ways I've customized Swishdot 
and would like to integrate some (but not all) of my changes back into 
Swishdot.  I make a small bundle with those changes and give it to him. 
  He adds the configuration from my bundle to Swishdot and releases a 
new bundle.  All this could be done without explicit versioning and 
distribution.

> 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.

I agree.  Nevertheless, a lot of Zope developers are concerned about the 
potential confusion resulting from broken assumptions about Zope "products".

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

We both know what the survey would tell us. :-)  But the target for Zope 
3 is Zope developers, not Zope users--not yet.

Shane