[Framework-Team] Re: Quick team meeting

Hanno Schlichting hannosch at hannosch.eu
Fri Mar 13 19:19:28 UTC 2009


Ross Patterson wrote:
> Hanno Schlichting <hannosch at hannosch.eu>
> writes:
> 
> Four of us (calvinhp, ErikRose, ErikRose, zenwryly) made it to the
> meeting and came up with a few things to act on.  I'll briefly describe
> them here so we can discuss.

Awesome!

> Some of the discussion centered around possible changes or
> clarifications to the PLIP process.  This begged the question, where is
> PLIP procedure documented?

The two current main sources of written documentation are:

https://dev.plone.org/plone/wiki/FrameworkTeam

and hidden in

http://plone.org/documentation/manual/plone-developer-reference/overview/referencemanual-all-pages

it would be good if the relevant bits from the latter could be
incorporated into the wiki. The general idea is to have all "development
of" type information inside the Trac wiki.

> As hanno said:
> 
>> I tried to take the initiative back in January to incorporate the
>> changed process from the Plone 3.x framework team and required
>> adjustments for the 4.0 process into our official process
>> documentation.  The discussion hasn't been very fruitful and ended
>> without a clear result.
> 
> So we need to determine the official home for the PLIP process
> documentation and evaluate the status of that which calvinhp said he'd
> take the lead on.

See above. I think the process for the 3.x release and 4.0 release
should be somewhat different. 4.0 is supposed to make many more
interconnected and radical changes, as we ever do in a single 3.x
release. The process needs to reflect this in some way. But I would
appreciate it if Calvin could indeed take the lead on this and I'll be
happy to comment and give my feedback.

> Since the Americans refused to distinguish themselves with clearly
> recognizable accents :) , I'm not sure whether it was calvinhp or
> ErikRose who suggested that we start sort of public presentation of
> changes happening in Plone 4.  The main goal is to reduce surprises.  We
> agreed that an informal process of blogging in more widely accessible
> language about what makes it into the ChangeLog would be good.  This
> could also be a way to collect feedback as well.  Discussion through
> blog comments may become a problem but we'll tackle that if it comes to
> Pass.  ErikRose said he'd take the lead on this.

This sounds like an excellent idea. I tried to write up something in
less technical terms inside those "Trac PLIP's" which hopefully go into
the direction of this. They haven't seen too widespread exposure yet,
from what I know. Is this the kind of information you are looking for?

There is even some more high-level roadmap information that isn't
written down at any point but has only been communicated in informal
conversations. I'd be happy to try to bring some of those to the public
in form of blog posts or any other form people find valuable.

> So far, much of the Plone 4 work has happened in narrower circles to
> free it up for prototyping, visioning, and imagining new approaches.
> This has been in part to isolate such a process from the paralysis that
> can come from discussion of edge cases or disagreements which are more
> proper and valuable at a later stage.  I raised a concern that as we
> start presenting this work more publicly, we should think about
> communicating and setting expectations for the impact of the backwards
> incompatible changes.  I proposed adding an explicit, formalized part of
> the PLIP procedure for community impact assessments.  I'd love a better
> name, but the idea is a place to communicate to the various parts of
> Plone communities (developers, integrators, themers, users, etc.),
> "Here's what you need to know to update your code/skills.  Here's where
> to find documentation."  I offered to take the lead on this.

Sounds good. I think this is a logical extension of the "Documentation
Impact" section we added to the 3.3 PLIP process.

One of the things I'd like to have a more important role in the PLIP
process is the "upgrade guide" we have on plone.org. I think taking the
"What's New" documentation from Python
(http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html) as an example could be
valuable here. I tried to introduce this to Zope2 at
http://docs.zope.org/zope2/releases/2.12/WHATSNEW.html with the chapters
written about Acquisition and IContainer changes.

This kind of information is probably best written by a combination of
the documentation team as we've done it for Plone 3.3 with more
involvement of the PLIP authors themselves.

Hanno





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