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

[Jonas Meurer]

Hello,

On 23/06/2009 Fabio Tranchitella wrote:
> 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.

First, it's great to see some process in the zope maintenance. Thanks
for your great work.

> We also drop support for Zope 2 and Plone in Debian and Ubuntu, asking
> for the removal of the packages from the distribution.

I would like to object against that decision, but see below.

> 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.

As already mentioned by someone else, zope2.12 will support pyhton2.5
and python2.6. Thus it should no longer be a problem to have zope2.X in
debian/ubuntu without python2.4.

> 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.

I don't use or know much about plone, so I cannot comment on here, but
as mentioned by someone, there seems to be some process to support newer
zope2 releases and python2.5+ as well.

> 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.

I do think that the debian zope managment tools (dzhandle,
zope-debhelper) do a great job, and I really would be sad to see them
go.

I already did some housekeeping maintenance work for zope2.{10,11} and
zope-common in the past, and I intend to continue that work in the
future.

Maybe we could just remove zope2.10 from the archive now, wait until a
zope2.12 release candidate is published, then upload that one, and
finally remove zope2.11 and python2.4 as well?

With that roadmap we at least would have one zope2 version in
debian/unstable all the time.

greetings,
 jonas
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