[Zope3-dev] Re: RFC: ZConfig and other formats for ZCML

[Andrew Sawyers]

     1. 
On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 18:29 +0100, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Fred Drake wrote:
> > On 1/23/06, Sidnei da Silva <sidnei at enfoldsystems.com> wrote:
> > 
> >>I suspect ZConfig was designed after the apache config format. I also
> >>suspect you haven't configured much Apache yourself.
> > 
> > 
> > Indeed, Apache configuration files were a major influence, and the
> > intended audience is substantially the same.
> 
> And the intended audience of ZCML is a very different audience - 
> developers versus sysadmins.
I'd have to say, I belived quite the opposite.  There are specific
references to Admins being part of the ZCML audience.  See specifically
http://www.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Zope3Book/zcml.html which says:  

     1. While the developer is certainly the one that writes the initial
        cut of the configuration, this user is not the real target
        audience. Once the product is written, you would expect a system
        administrator to interact much more frequently with the
        configuration, adding and removing functionality or adjust the
        configuration of the server setup. System administrators are
        often not developers, so that it would be unfortunate to write
        the configuration in the programming language, here Python. But
        an administrator is familiar with configuration scripts, shell
        code and XML to some extend. Therefore an easy to read syntax
        that is similar to other configuration files is of advantage.
     2. 
     3. 

I would argue that the apache config is comparable to Zope 3's ZCML - in
that, if I wanted to enable/disable some feature typically included with
Apache, say CGI support - this is done in Apache's config files.
Granted I understand there are some differences, but it is worthy to
note that there is some cross-over between Apache's configuration file
audiences and Zope 3's ZCML files and ZConfig (zope.conf).

More importantly to me (being one who is pushing Zope 3 in the
Enterprise and recently supplying a summary of the online ZCML data to
my fellow developers), what is the 'official' position if the Zope3 book
on zope.org is wrong or who says it's wrong and why the change in
positions?  This occurred to me when Stephan recently said something
similar, but I'd forgotten where I had read otherwise.

Thanks,
Andrew Sawyers

> Regards,
> 

> Martijn
> 
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