On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 21:28:09 -, Stephan Richter
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I have spent the last two weeks working on a proposal that defines a Zope
Software Certification Program (ZSCP) and a Common Repository that
implements
this process. The proposal is attached to this mail. I welcome any
comments
about it!
Hi Stephan,
I have only skimmed the document, since it's 1am and I'm going to the
mountains tomorrow. I expect a triple-digit post count in this thread when
I return. :)
I think the proposal is very well put-together. I think it admirably tries
to make the Zope 3 community more inclusive of more peripheral developers
who simply use the framework, and I think this will benefit Zope immensely
if done right.
My immediate concern is about resources: Who will have the time or
incentive to police the common repository and grant certification? It
seems to be a non-trivial process that may end up being quite
time-consuming. It may be perceived as too much red tape. It may be
perceived as too much centralised control, especially around licensing. At
times it may also be open to debate, and a means of resolving disputes
would seem necessary. There are certainly a lot of tick-boxes in your
table! :-)
Secondly, and partly because I'm expecting this to come up in my absence:
your proposal is eerily simlar to Alan's two-level Plone collective post
to plone-dev, about having an approved list of contributors and packages
in a fenced-off repository, in addition to the collective.
One obvious parallel here, by the way, is with the svn.plone.org/plone
repository. That one is controlled by the Plone Foundation, requires a
contributor agreement, and imposes restrictions on license and quality
(albeit not as formally as you do). I think this is possibly a more valid
comparison than with the Collective.
I'm actually +1 on your proposal in spirit (if it can be shown to work,
and if there is a broad consensus in the community to support it - in
fact, this is important: if there is too much division, the proposal would
likely be self-defeating) and -1 on his.
The reason is that the Plone world is quite different from the Zope 3
world (although there are hard-core Plone developers who sit in both). The
Plone community is much larger but naturally also more dispersed. The
software is much more narrowly defined (depending on your point of view I
suppose, but I mean - it's a CMS, Zope 3 is a framework) and the
components developed for it are much closer to the user.
Plone thrives on the size and vibrancy of its community. A very large part
of its success comes from third party products that people find and marry
with Plone to solve their problems. Without the low bar to contributing
such components, without an open and very democratic Collective, and
without meta-data on http://plone.org/products, I don't think this would
be possible, certainly not as successful. The uptake of third party
product users and contributors, and I think maybe also the quality, has
improved quite significantly since we introduced the Products section on
plone.org.
A framework like Zope 3, and framework-level third party components,
thrives more on control and consistency in vision and implementation. (In
part, you're solving that with better guidelines around how to write code,
guidelines that Zope 3 adopters also benefit from.) I think that the lower
down the stack you go, the higher the degree of centralised
quality-control needs to be. This, however, is at the expense of perceived
eltism and a raised bar to entry. I think that balance is different in
Plone than it is in Zope 3.
Put differently, I think that *some* Plone components ought to move lower
down the stack, target re-usability in different systems, and thus be
subject to somewhat different rules. Perhaps these components shouldn't
have been Plone components in the first place, or perhaps their evolution
would start in Plone and move down the stack. But I think it would be
damaging for the Plone community, given its current shape and culture, to
impose those rules across the types of components that are higher up the
stack - arguably those components which should be Plone components still.
I'd also note that we solve (or try/continue to solve) some of the
visibility and evaluation problems on http://plone.org/products (which is
of course open source, albeit GPL, and you can re-use any of this you see
fit). Some of those same things, you solve with more technical means -
automated testing, common file layouts, XML metadata files. Again, I think
these approaches work better at the
small-component-high-reusability/framework level than they do with the
types of user-facing components that typically land in the Collective.
Although you proposal is not technical in design, it's technical in
implementation (so to speak). Perhaps it would be fair to
