release notes on Zope

[A Mennucc]

hi

some time ago I tried to upgrade my Zope/Plone from Sarge to Etch, and I
failed; (see my message "test upgrade,	Re: Bug#411657: Transition from
sarge-etch for zope packages", message id
20070223091028.GA14352 at tonelli.sns.it ).
At the time, I received some interesting advices, such as how to convert
obsolete plone internationalization using
http://plone.org/products/linguaplone/issues/23 .

Lately, some other upgrade problems were discussed in bug 411657

Moreover, we should not forget that the whole dealing with zope products
and instances has been completely refactored , by introducing dzhandle .

I really think we should summarize all ideas and prepare a short notice
to be put in sec 5 in the release notes; here is a very rough draft ;
please fill in what you know better than me, and rewrite as you please

------------------

Since the time of the release of Debian 3.0, many important changes have
occurred in Debian regarding Zope and its related products. There are
important considerations that an user willing to upgrade should be aware of.

Zope and all zope related products were updated ;  Debian 3.0 ("Sarge")
shipped zope 2.7 , that depends on python2.3 ; and it shipped CMF 1.4
and Plone  2.0.5 ; while Debian 4.0 ("Etch") instead ships zope 2.9,
which depends on python2.4, and CMF 1.6 and Plone 2.5.1 .

Some products were also dropped from the distribution (either because
they were obsoleted, or incompatible with the newer Zope, CMF and Plone)
, such as zope-backtalk , zope-callprofiler , zope-dtmlcalendar ,
zope-filesystemsite , zope-generator , zope-i18nfolder , zope-i18nlayer
, zope-kinterbasdbda , zope-localizer , zope-mysqlda , zope-parsedxml ,
zope-quotafolder , zope-speedpack , zope-testcase ,
zope-translationservice , zope-verbosesecurity , zope-xmlmethods ,
zope-zaaplugins , zope-zattachmentattribute , zope-znavigator ,
zope-zpatterns , zope-zpatterns


The user wishing to upgrade must beware of a known fact: there is no
easy and guaranteed way to upgrade a complex Zope/Plone server from zope
2.7/plone 2.0.5 up to zope 2.9/plone 2.5.1 .

Even though Plone contains a migration tool, indeed, due to the
complexity of the Plone server, it has been experienced that the
automatic migration may easily fail, in particular when the plone server
was customized by adding extra products and/or tweaking some of its
internals (such as, skins, authentication, etc etc).

One example situation that will surely lead to a migration failure is a
Plone 2.0.5 site using zope-i18nlayer for internationalization : this is
 incompatible with Plone 2.5 (where it is substituted by
zope-plonelanguagetool ) ; a script that may ease the transformation may
be found in http://plone.org/products/linguaplone/issues/23

For this reason, it is recommended that the user willing to upgrade be
able to run both the old (= Sarge) and the new (= Etch) version of
Debian for as long as needed for the correct migration of his Zope/Plone
services.

The easiest way to achieve this is to make a copy of the O.S. onto
another hard disk or hard disk partition, and then upgrade one of the
two copies , and use chroots to run the Sarge version in parallel to the
Etch version.

In case this is not possible, there is a limited possibility of running
different versions of those products in the same Debian installation:
it is indeed possible to concurrently keep zope 2.7 and 2.9 , and python
2.3 and 2.4 installed in Debian , since different version are in
packages by different names, namely zope2.7 , zope2.9 , python2.3 ,
python2.4 . But it is very important to notice that Etch does not
contain the Sarge versions : so, during upgrade, good care must be taken
 that the old version not be removed .  Also, the above does not apply
to Plone, since the plone package is not similarly  versioned, alas.


We conclude by remarking that, in Etch a completely new system for
dealing with zope products and instances was introduced, that is based
on the tool "dzhandle", that replaces what wa in the package "zopectl"
....[INSERT MORE INFO HERE]

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a.

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