[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3 as a reliable platform?!?

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Christian Theune wrote:
> But to be honest, I too often get the feeling that something in the
> process is wrong and we are failing to acknowledge it or work on it.
> 
> I think we make it way to hard for people who want to use Zope 3 as
> developers making applications with Zope 3.
> 
> Why? Because we keep changing stuff and don't tell people in VERY LARGE
> LETTERS about it.

Huh? When I changed stuff, I wrote proposals, asked for feedback, 
provided deprecation messages and CHANGES.txt entries... What else do 
you want?

> What worries me most is that I, although I'm contributing to Zope 3
> every now and then, even fall into this quite often and I'm getting
> tired of it.
> 
> I can't read every proposal or every commit message or every post on the
> mailing list.

Reading the changelog should be enough.

> I try to, but I can't. And I think that normal developers
> shouldn't have to try to.

They read the changelog. That's why we do it, right? If no-one reads it 
and doesn't find it useful, we might just as well not do it at all.

> When Philipp explained the zope.component thing in an earlier post I got
> annoyed again because I was relying on information that obviously was
> false.

You were just making a wrong assumption. You THOUGHT things were like X 
but they were Y. I don't know what led you to the assumption, but it 
can't be Zope's fault if you make it :).

> That's probably my fault because I didn't digg deep enough to
> verify the truth whether zope.component.provideUtility works against the
> thread local component registry or not.

Dig deep enough? How about digging ALL THE WAY (sorry, being ironic 
here) to zope.component.interfaces and reading the declaration of 
provideUtility:

     def provideUtility(component, provides=None, name=u''):
         """Register a utility globally
	...

How is that not clear? If you don't read interfaces for what we provide 
them (declarative documentation), then I'm running out of ideas on how 
to satisfy you.

> When I saw that
> zope.*app*.component does that I got scared because it's so similar and
> maybe hard to distinguish.

Is this a rant about our development process or about the complexity of 
zope.app.component?

> What I'm worried about is that we have to come up with a *MUCH* better
> way to tell people "What is *the single* way to do this or that?" and
> "Hey, we used to do it *this* way, but HEADSUP, now it's *that* way!".

I'd welcome any constructive suggestions. I, for one, suggested a 
"What's new in Zope 3.X" article.  Baiju M started such an article 
(google it) and I contributed a few things here and there to it. (Thanks 
to Baiju, btw!!!)

> Again, maybe I'm only hitting this all the time because I'm living most
> of my live on pre-release-branches or the trunk, but still.
> 
> I think if Zope 3 shall be used by many people, this is a major obstacle.

Whether it's many or just few people... RTFMing is all it takes for them 
to get started. I've written a whole friggen book for them, for cryin' 
out loud :)

> I hope I don't annoy anybody, but I had to get that off my mind.

Sure. Grab a cool beer, cool off and start improving the situation 
tomorrow (and tell me how so I can do it in the future too) :)

Philipp