Hello all! In the last couple of weeks Brian Sutherland, Matthias Klose and I worked together to improve the Zope packaging for Debian and Ubuntu. This e-mail summarizes the problems we faced, the decisions that have been taken and the changes that we will upload to experimental and unstable in the next weeks.
Short summary ============= We switch from a monolithic Zope 3 package to individual packages for the libraries that are part of the ZTK (Zope Toolkit). Zope instance management tools are not supported anymore, as we suggest the use of WSGI. We also drop support for Zope 2 and Plone in Debian and Ubuntu, asking for the removal of the packages from the distribution. Background ========== It is a known fact that the Zope community, as well as the Plone one, prefers to use other means of installation for their software and usually dislikes the integration of Zope and Plone with the Debian and Ubuntu distributions. The suggested upstream way to install plone, for example, is the unified installer. ZTK developers suggest the use of zc.buildout. These tools create an isolated environment where it is possible to develop and run your software with a very limited interactions with the rest of the system. I think it is better to split the two worlds, Zope2 and ZTK, to better understand their specific needs. ZTK === Right now zope3 is a monolithic source and binary package which provides all the python libraries released inside the old-style monolithic tarball called Zope 3. Upstream stopped distributing Zope 3 as a monolithic tarball, transforming the concept of a monolithic "Zope 3" framework into a collection of independent python libraries (the ZTK, Zope Toolkit). The eggification of Zope 3 is a great path towards interoperability between different python frameworks, and we decided to modify our packaging methods in this direction: each library will be packaged as an independent source/binary package. Considering that WSGI is the actual standard for python web frameworks the instance management tools, previously part of the zope3 package, won't be packaged anymore: the most important WSGI servers and tools are already packaged and available in the archive. It is worth mentioning that the last monolithic release only supports python2.5, but some of the libraries that are part of the Zope Toolkit already support python2.6. It's also important to note that a lot of software in the monolithic tarball will not be present in the ZTK packages because it is deprecated/unmaintained at source and has large/complex dependency trees. For these reasons we decided to focus on relatively stable packages which have sane dependency graphs. Other packages may be maintained, but outside the official repositories. We will only maintain what members of the Debian/Ubuntu Zope team use, focusing on automatic testing to provide the high quality standards. As of today, these are the packages supported by the team: - transaction - zc.lockfile - ZConfig - zdaemon - ZODB3 - zope.authentication - zope.browser - zope.cachedescriptors - zope.component - zope.configuration - zope.dottedname - zope.event - zope.exceptions - zope.hookable - zope.i18nmessageid - zope.interface - zope.location - zope.proxy - zope.publisher - zope.schema - zope.security - zope.testbrowser - zope.testing - zope.traversing The aforementioned policy is also available from the team web page: http://pkg-zope.alioth.debian.org. Comments and suggestions are welcome! Zope 2 and Plone ================ Zope 2 and Plone are obviously related, so the future of one of the two influences the other one. The main problem for Zope2 is that the current stable upstream branch (2.12) still requires pthon2.4. This is not acceptable in Debian and Ubuntu, and Zope 2 is right now the only stopper for the removal of python2.4 from both Debian and Ubuntu. Even worse, the current stable Plone releases requires Zope 2.10, which we suppose will never support anything but python2.4 in the foreseeable future. The new major upstream branch (Plone 4) is still far from being released, which means that the only way to support Plone and Zope 2.x in Debian and Ubuntu is to keep python2.4 in the distribution. For this reason, together with the upstream suggestions to use the unified installer and zc.buildout as primary tools for deploying Zope 2 and Plone, the Debian/Ubuntu Zope Team decided to drop support for Zope 2, Plone and all the other Zope 2 products. We will file requests of removal for all the Zope and Plone packages from the archive. Thanks for reading this! Fabio Tranchitella on behalf of the Debian/Ubuntu Zope Team -- Fabio Tranchitella <kob...@debian.org> .''`. Proud Debian GNU/Linux developer, admin and user. : :' : `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~kobold/ `- _____________________________________________________________________ 1024D/7F961564, fpr 5465 6E69 E559 6466 BF3D 9F01 2BF8 EE2B 7F96 1564
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