[Zope3-dev] Tossing Data.fs considered harmful

[Tres Seaver]

I would like to ask for consensus among the Zope 3 development community
that we stop requiring people to discard existing databases without
recourse.  In particular, this week has seen two changes which caused
working sites to break, and which offered no possibility of saving any
data or TTW software (actually, the "service renaming" change left the
database readable, but applications broke;  the "opaque pickles" branch
makes the database unreadable).

Continuing the current practice is an active disincentive for people to
begin building applications and sites with Zope3.  Such "higher-level"
development is going to be increasingly important as we go forward:  it
provides important feedback about the usefulness and usability of the
infrastructure.  Having working, interesting applications be available
for the Zope3 platform seems essential before we can event contemplate a
release;  such applications won't be written prior to the release if we
frustrate their authors into abandoning Zope3 due to repeated data loss.

I would therefore propose that any future changes which have such an
inmpact remain unmerged until they include a conversion script or other
mechanism to provide forward compatibility.

Tres.
-- 
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver@zope.com
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