[Zope3-dev] Re: More thoughts on packaging

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> I find more and more people who are increasingly sceptical of ZCML, 
>> mostly because it's XML. They would really prefer a simpler style.
> 
> I don't think this is increasing; people have been railing against the 
> evil XML-ish ZCML from the start.

Yes, but I talk to more and more Zope2 veterans about Zope3 and ZCML and 
they are quite sceptical. Thus, the amount of ZCML scepticism is 
increasing proportionally to the number of people learning about Zope3 :)

>> ZConfig is very popular among them. I personally think using an 
>> XML-variant can have its advantages when it comes to parsing, 
>> validation, editing (-> relaxNG schema, etc.), transforming etc. But 
>> simplicity counts, too... "Simple is better than complex".
> 
> As long as the format is regular it is possible to write a tool to 
> convert to XML and back. Using XML natively has its benefits as you 
> don't have to write these tools, and people don't have to learn new 
> syntax rules.

... and the whole zope.configuration machinery conveniently uses 
SAXParser w/o reinventing the wheel.

> Those people who don't like ZCML because it's too verbose can design 
> their own better 'compact' syntax and convert to ZCML from that. I'd be 
> very curious to see those efforts and may even participate.

I'm thinking about ZConfig <-> ZCML and/or ConfigParser (ini) <-> ZCML. 
Though I would much rather like the backend of zope.configuration to be 
pluggable. It is currently very XML-specific...

Philipp