[Product-Developers] <pissed> Generating the Dexterity boilerplate for Plone 4.3</pissed>

David Glick (Plone) david.glick at plone.org
Tue May 28 05:38:51 UTC 2013


On 5/27/13 3:30 AM, ajung wrote:
> I have one thing to add. Some person tried to explain me (in a pointless way)
> how OSS works...
>
> Here is the situation: most of us wear more than one head...most of work as
> integrator and as core developers (in some way).
>
> Shouting out "fix this yourself" is not an answer.
>
> With former releases the costs and amount of work for performing Plone
> upgrade has been predictable. With Plone 4.2 and Plone 4.3 I ran into so
> many weird problems. In fact a migration estimated to two days took four
> extra unpaid days.  My subjective feeling is said migration between Plone
> 4.X versions became harder and more work than migration in Plone 3.x and
> even between Plone 4.X
>
> Here is the point: customers expect reasonable prices and we integrators
> need a reliable framework under the hood.
>
> As integrator _and_ core developer: Yes, I could analyse and fix lots of
> things. Who pays this?
>
> Integrators that are not core developer: they are pissed because everything
> is a moving target. Add-ons must be ported and adjust from version to
> version; things became unpredictable and unreliable
>
> Plone end-user maintaining and running Plone without special background are
> even more pissed by missing documentation, improper documentation, broken
> tools etc.
>
> This situation - especially seen from the prospective of customer (including
> large university
> customers) - is seen with sceptism.
>
> The situation is paranoid: we are running around and tell people how call
> Plone is
> (if it works) - but in real life we have the feeling that Plone became a
> piece of scary and fragile
> crap.
>
Yes, a stable and reliable framework is important. Failures to achieve 
that hurts the entire community: customers, because they have to pay 
more than they expected for an upgrade; integrators, because they have 
to make compromises to satisfy upset customers; and core developers, 
because they lose motivation trying to respond to upset integrators.

So whose responsibility is it to guarantee that reliability? It is the 
responsibility of the entire community. We do not have an organization 
that pays people to do quality assurance and that guarantees 
satisfaction with the framework. As long as there are lots of us 
individual combined-integrator-and-core-developer people who actually 
contribute fixes to problems, that is actually a strength of Plone as a 
framework: there isn't a single company whose failure would jeopardize 
the reliability of the software. But it does mean that we need share in 
the work that needs to be done, and it's the reason that sometimes the 
response is "fix it yourself."

Thanks for pointing out some specific places where the Dexterity 
documentation is out of date. Steve McMahon and I are working on fixing 
this. Additional specific suggestions for improvements, as opposed to 
general griping, would be appreciated.

David


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