[Zope3-dev] Re: Release management refinements

[Stephan Richter]

On Wednesday 13 September 2006 13:28, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> Contributing to a community also means adapting to its processes and way
> of working. The process has been working well for Zope 2 developers, so
> I don't see why it can't work for Zope 3.

A couple of comments:

First, if several -- as in a majority of -- people say "I work this way W.", 
then our process should be adapted to those people. Having those people 
contribute less, because of an unnecessary barrier.

Second, Zope 2 and 3 are *very* different in this respect. Zope 2 does not 
have the same testing story. In Zope 2 it was risky, if not impossible, to 
use the trunk, because those large frameworks (CMF, Plone, ...) that had very 
tight couplings with Zope 2 had to be adjusted in many cases.

Zope 3 is different, since the trunk is effectively as stable as any release 
at any time, especially now with the even stricter trunk policies and the 
desire to move packages out of the core. This allows developers to develop 
against the trunk.

And even if the trunk is shaken by deprecation warnings like your 
refactorings, most packages based on Zope 3 were updated within a week, even 
large projects like SchoolTool and Tiks. This is a very strong statement and 
warrants a different check-in policy.

To get into an even more fundamental discussion, I claim that the culture of 
test-driven development weakens some common software-engineering practices, 
such as release cycles. I think, and seeing our discussions it seems I am 
right, that releases are marketing tools, not important software engineering 
artifacts. Releases allow us to say, "Here are those great new features.",
write a magazine article, be slashdotted, and tell the client we are already 
in version 3.X where X > 100.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the motivations behind releases, besides 
those points. It allows other developers to have a set target  and something 
to rely on, etc. Thus I said, it "weakens" the release artifact, not 
"obsolete" it.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training