The future of Zope{2,3} and Plone in Debian and Ubuntu

[Fabio Tranchitella]

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 <kobold at debian.org>                        .''`.
Proud Debian GNU/Linux developer, admin and user.            : :'  :
                                                             `. `'`
   http://people.debian.org/~kobold/                           `-
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