[Zope3-dev] Tossing Data.fs considered harmful

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On Saturday, March 15, 2003, at 10:27  AM, Tres Seaver wrote:

> 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.

Are we far enough along that we can actually build sites and 
applications?  I have an application I made for Zope 2 that I think 
would be an excellent case study in writing / moving to Zope 3 to 
highlight the differences.  I'd like to start experimenting with it, 
writing about it, etc.  But considering that March 1 has come and gone 
and there's been no mention of Zope 3x Alpha 2 (as mentioned in Jim's 
Zope 3 roadmap [1]), I was wondering how stable/usable the core really 
is.  I was thinking that we're still in early alpha stages when things 
might just go *boom!*

Besides, documentation is still so scant (understandably, considering 
the still early nature of Zope 3X) that I'd be surprised if anyone's 
actually figured out how to make Zope 3 actually work (outside of the 
core developers).  I mean, I still can't figure out the Object Hub and 
when/where or even really how to use it.  So, if higher level 
development is actually attainable by now, I'm interested in following 
it and in trying to write articles about it as I figure it out.  But if 
such higher level development is actually attainable, I imagine that 
it's time for a new Alpha release so that we don't stray too far from 
Jim's proposed roadmap.

[1] http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2003-January/005312.html

Considering the proposed Interface Implements change proposal that's 
still floating around, I imagine that should settle before any such 
release,