[Zope3-dev] Re: Known-good-sets problem

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

I'm glad some steps are taken!

What I really don't like about this proposal is that it talks about 
updating index pages. If I understand this right, an updated index page 
will force everybody that uses this index page into an update. I don't 
think this is acceptable. Instead I'd suggest you institute a rule that 
index pages should never be changed after initial publication, just like 
eggs shouldn't be changed after publication either. Instead, a new index 
page should be published for each update. People can then choose to 
switch whenever they like.

My main suggestion is to not forget that this needs to be clearly 
documented and the document describing which steps to take should be 
published.

My main worry is that I don't like maintaining dependency lists on 
remote servers somewhere. My intuition is that we should maintain these 
lists close to the actual software. With grok we're managing this list 
now as a versions.cfg in subversion. Anyway, this is just a worry, and 
we'll have to see how this pans out.

We've gone another direction with the Grok project this week, where we 
publish a versions.cfg on the web that gets included in a buildout.cfg. 
This approach was based on suggestions by yourself to me, and had been 
discussed by Philipp on the mailing list earlier, but apparently the 
choice was made to go for index pages instead.

So, it's a bit of a shame this extensive work will now be made mostly 
redundant by these new efforts. Anyway, we'll be using this for a while 
at least and we'll wait and see how this new works pans out.

Regards,

Martijn