October 4, 2009

ZClasses are back...or....people who live in the glass houses should not throw stones

ZClasses resurrected as an external package for Zope 2.12. Fine - ZClasses are back for people who still depend on them.

But what is wrong with this package?

Basically nothing - except its package description is borked in two ways.

First, it is telling stories that do not belong into a package description on Pypi and second, parts of the statements are just ranting (they belong into a personal blog but not on PyPI).

The decision to remove ZClasses had a backing by the majority of the active Zope developers. Some of people opened up their mouths from time to time over the last years in order to take the over responsibility over ZClasses - but nobody stepped up. In fact some ZClasses functionality has been broken over several Zope major releases - e.g. the distribution code that was broken since Zope 2.9 (at least).

Removing ZClasses from the prospective of software quality was more than overdue in Zope 2.12. I've read the critics made within the package description but I just have to ignore it - especially the critic about the "influentual release manager". Zope as an open-source project is steered and directed by those people that actively participate in the community in order to bring the project forward. As a release manager I have a certain influence on the technical aspects of the project but the majority of contributions over the last years had nothing to do with my influence. The release manager is the man with the whip that cares about release dates, bugs and other related things. So the Zope project makes as much progress as each individual project member contributes to the project.

But as the package author wrote: Zope is open-source and everybody has the freedom baking its cake in private or sharing it with others - or: people who live in the glass houses should not throw stones