Python UK meeting and Django

[Peter Bengtsson]

I'm a little drunk as I'm writing this as the majority of tonights
Python UK meetup happened at the pub.
I held a quick talk about Grok which went fine. I was supposed to do a
demo that shows how it works but because my stupid KDE failed on me I
had to do a unprepared talk which, in retrospect, I'm happy with.

The only question I had to answer was "What about ZCML?". I replied
"At the 5 day sprint I got back from yesterday I only wrote on single
line of ZCML" to which Tim Cooper asked jokingly, "And how long was
that one line?"

Jacob Kaplan Moss then held a longer talk about the history and
success of Django. At the questions and answers afterwards I asked one
of the questions:
"What key thing do you think made Django so successful?"
His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
"I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
developers whereas Django is for users".
I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
is that already what we're doing?

--
Peter Bengtsson,
work www.fry-it.com
home www.peterbe.com
hobby www.issuetrackerproduct.com
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[David Bain-5]

To follow on the meme of being "for users"... I got sucked into Zope due to the whole zclasses TTW thing. It was only with archetypes and later archgenxml that I started to become productive on the filesystem development thing. Grok is way easier, but doesn't have all the cool toys that Plone/Zope now has, this will change and I predict that I will begin to use more Grok to solve all those non CMS problems that I'm now solving with Plone.

My 2 pence.

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 5:28 PM, Peter Bengtsson <peter@...> wrote:

I'm a little drunk as I'm writing this as the majority of tonights
Python UK meetup happened at the pub.
I held a quick talk about Grok which went fine. I was supposed to do a
demo that shows how it works but because my stupid KDE failed on me I
had to do a unprepared talk which, in retrospect, I'm happy with.

The only question I had to answer was "What about ZCML?". I replied
"At the 5 day sprint I got back from yesterday I only wrote on single
line of ZCML" to which Tim Cooper asked jokingly, "And how long was
that one line?"

Jacob Kaplan Moss then held a longer talk about the history and
success of Django. At the questions and answers afterwards I asked one
of the questions:
"What key thing do you think made Django so successful?"
His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
"I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
developers whereas Django is for users".
I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
is that already what we're doing?

--
Peter Bengtsson,
work www.fry-it.com
home www.peterbe.com
hobby www.issuetrackerproduct.com
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[Kevin M. Smith]

Peter Bengtsson wrote:

> Jacob Kaplan Moss then held a longer talk about the history and
> success of Django. At the questions and answers afterwards I asked one
> of the questions:
> "What key thing do you think made Django so successful?"
> His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
> features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
> community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
> "I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
> developers whereas Django is for users".
> I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
> board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
> is that already what we're doing?

<rant>
That kind of put down burns me up.

Lately I've been playing with DJango and CherryPy to take advantage of
Google AppEngine technology and it feels like it's 10 years behind
Grok/Zope3.  Has he gone through the tutorial lately?

"Design your URLs"

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/$', 'mysite.views.year_archive'),
    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/$', 'mysite.views.month_archive'),
    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d+)/$', 'mysite.views.article_detail'),
)

C'mon regexp dispatching? GROK SMASH.

Views:

def year_archive(request, year):
    a_list = Article.objects.filter(pub_date__year=year)
    return render_to_response('news/year_archive.html', {'year': year, 'article_list': a_list}) render_to_response (blah, blah,blah.... what??

render_to_response blah blah is better for users? GROK SMASH

Templates:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block title %}Articles for {{ year }}{% endblock %}

{% block content %}
<h1>Articles for {{ year }}</h1>

{% for article in article_list %}
<p>{{ article.headline }}</p>
<p>By {{ article.reporter.full_name }}</p>
<p>Published {{ article.pub_date|date:"F j, Y" }}</p>
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}

Yeah, stick that in your DreamWeaver. GROK SMASH

And "This is Just the Surface".
Yeah, don't forget to install Apache, mod_python, psycopg2/posgresql,
and set your PYTHONPATH to include DJango/create a symbolic link to
DJango. Cuz that's what users like to do. :) GROK SMASH

Wait until you find out all the stuff they still can't do that Zope  
already discovered, solved and refactored 10 years ago.

There's a whole lotta Django apps that could be written super-easy on
Zope2, but.... where's all the python code. Don't need much really...
Hmmm... but I wanna write python code....

They were successful due to brilliant marketing (kudos man), a
mostly-developed python answer to RoR, a good sense of timing and strong
community development skills.

Perhaps grok is being too nice. GROK SMASH YET ANOTHER ROR RIPOFF.
</rant>

Of course a real advantage for DJango is that they are AppEngine ready.
Interestingly the Datastore is much more akin to the ZODB than it is to
an RDB.

No hard feelings. :)

Kevin Smith





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[David Bain-5]

It is important to take a lesson from history. The better technology doesn't necessary win. It is the technology with the mindshare and the marketing.

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Kevin Smith <kevin@...> wrote:

Peter Bengtsson wrote:

Jacob Kaplan Moss then held a longer talk about the history and
success of Django. At the questions and answers afterwards I asked one
of the questions:
"What key thing do you think made Django so successful?"
His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
"I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
developers whereas Django is for users".
I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
is that already what we're doing?

<rant>
That kind of put down burns me up.

Lately I've been playing with DJango and CherryPy to take advantage of Google AppEngine technology and it feels like it's 10 years behind Grok/Zope3.  Has he gone through the tutorial lately?

"Design your URLs"

urlpatterns = patterns('',
  (r'^articles/(\d{4})/$', 'mysite.views.year_archive'),
  (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/$', 'mysite.views.month_archive'),
  (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d+)/$', 'mysite.views.article_detail'),
)

C'mon regexp dispatching? GROK SMASH.

Views:

def year_archive(request, year):
  a_list = Article.objects.filter(pub_date__year=year)
  return render_to_response('news/year_archive.html', {'year': year, 'article_list': a_list}) render_to_response (blah, blah,blah.... what??

render_to_response blah blah is better for users? GROK SMASH

Templates:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block title %}Articles for {{ year }}{% endblock %}

{% block content %}
<h1>Articles for {{ year }}</h1>

{% for article in article_list %}
<p>{{ article.headline }}</p>
<p>By {{ article.reporter.full_name }}</p>
<p>Published {{ article.pub_date|date:"F j, Y" }}</p>
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}

Yeah, stick that in your DreamWeaver. GROK SMASH

And "This is Just the Surface".
Yeah, don't forget to install Apache, mod_python, psycopg2/posgresql, and set your PYTHONPATH to include DJango/create a symbolic link to DJango. Cuz that's what users like to do. :) GROK SMASH

Wait until you find out all the stuff they still can't do that Zope  already discovered, solved and refactored 10 years ago.

There's a whole lotta Django apps that could be written super-easy on Zope2, but.... where's all the python code. Don't need much really... Hmmm... but I wanna write python code....

They were successful due to brilliant marketing (kudos man), a mostly-developed python answer to RoR, a good sense of timing and strong community development skills.

Perhaps grok is being too nice. GROK SMASH YET ANOTHER ROR RIPOFF.
</rant>

Of course a real advantage for DJango is that they are AppEngine ready. Interestingly the Datastore is much more akin to the ZODB than it is to an RDB.

No hard feelings. :)

Kevin Smith

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[Noah Gift]

They were successful due to brilliant marketing (kudos man), a mostly-developed python answer to RoR, a good sense of timing and strong community development skills.

I agree, and if you doubt this truth, then read Four Hour Work Week.  Anyone can create their own image, and expertise in weeks, but it requires tenacious and persistent marketing.  They, or the entity, needs to write many articles, give talks, etc.  Unfortunately, often the very smartest people suck the most at engaging in this type of necessary behavior.

 

Perhaps grok is being too nice. GROK SMASH YET ANOTHER ROR RIPOFF.
</rant>

Of course a real advantage for DJango is that they are AppEngine ready. Interestingly the Datastore is much more akin to the ZODB than it is to an RDB.

I have been playing with the Datastore and like it quite a bit.  I would love to see a version of Grok that just uses the Datastore as option.  I would really, really like Grok then.  I know we have a "Global Sprint" coming at the end of May, and also some people that use Grok will be attending the Google I/O event.  Anyone want to try...?

 

No hard feelings. :)

Kevin Smith

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[Reed O'Brien]

On May 6, 2008, at 6:28 PM, Peter Bengtsson wrote:

> I'm a little drunk as I'm writing this as the majority of tonights
> Python UK meetup happened at the pub.

burp

> His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
> features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
> community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
> "I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
> developers whereas Django is for users".


reed:~ reedobrien$ easy_install django
Searching for django
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/django/
Couldn't find index page for 'django' (maybe misspelled?)
Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while)
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/Django/
Reading http://www.djangoproject.com/
No local packages or download links found for django
error: Could not find suitable distribution for  
Requirement.parse('django')

 >>> import django
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named django

sigh.

I respect what you haven't done.

Next I'll try sqlonrails I hear it does everything...


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[Peter Bengtsson]

That's a great writeup! I wish you could write a blog rant on exactly
this and I'll definitely vote it up on Reddit.

Reading between the lines I think what you're saying is that Grok
already appeals to users rather than developers actually. Now, let's
make the documentation and the website equally appealing.

2008/5/7 Kevin Smith <kevin@...>:

> Peter Bengtsson wrote:
>
> > Jacob Kaplan Moss then held a longer talk about the history and
> > success of Django. At the questions and answers afterwards I asked one
> > of the questions:
> > "What key thing do you think made Django so successful?"
> > His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
> > features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
> > community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
> > "I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
> > developers whereas Django is for users".
> > I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
> > board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
> > is that already what we're doing?
> >
>  <rant>
>  That kind of put down burns me up.
>
>  Lately I've been playing with DJango and CherryPy to take advantage of
> Google AppEngine technology and it feels like it's 10 years behind
> Grok/Zope3.  Has he gone through the tutorial lately?
>
>  "Design your URLs"
>
>  urlpatterns = patterns('',
>    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/$', 'mysite.views.year_archive'),
>    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/$', 'mysite.views.month_archive'),
>    (r'^articles/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(\d+)/$', 'mysite.views.article_detail'),
>  )
>
>  C'mon regexp dispatching? GROK SMASH.
>
>  Views:
>
>  def year_archive(request, year):
>    a_list = Article.objects.filter(pub_date__year=year)
>    return render_to_response('news/year_archive.html', {'year': year,
> 'article_list': a_list}) render_to_response (blah, blah,blah.... what??
>
>  render_to_response blah blah is better for users? GROK SMASH
>
>  Templates:
>
>  {% extends "base.html" %}
>
>  {% block title %}Articles for {{ year }}{% endblock %}
>
>  {% block content %}
>  <h1>Articles for {{ year }}</h1>
>
>  {% for article in article_list %}
>  <p>{{ article.headline }}</p>
>  <p>By {{ article.reporter.full_name }}</p>
>  <p>Published {{ article.pub_date|date:"F j, Y" }}</p>
>  {% endfor %}
>  {% endblock %}
>
>  Yeah, stick that in your DreamWeaver. GROK SMASH
>
>  And "This is Just the Surface".
>  Yeah, don't forget to install Apache, mod_python, psycopg2/posgresql, and
> set your PYTHONPATH to include DJango/create a symbolic link to DJango. Cuz
> that's what users like to do. :) GROK SMASH
>
>  Wait until you find out all the stuff they still can't do that Zope
> already discovered, solved and refactored 10 years ago.
>
>  There's a whole lotta Django apps that could be written super-easy on
> Zope2, but.... where's all the python code. Don't need much really...
> Hmmm... but I wanna write python code....
>
>  They were successful due to brilliant marketing (kudos man), a
> mostly-developed python answer to RoR, a good sense of timing and strong
> community development skills.
>
>  Perhaps grok is being too nice. GROK SMASH YET ANOTHER ROR RIPOFF.
>  </rant>
>
>  Of course a real advantage for DJango is that they are AppEngine ready.
> Interestingly the Datastore is much more akin to the ZODB than it is to an
> RDB.
>
>  No hard feelings. :)
>
>  Kevin Smith
>
>
>
>
>
>

--
Peter Bengtsson,
work www.fry-it.com
home www.peterbe.com
hobby www.issuetrackerproduct.com
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[Kamon Ayeva-3]

Hi,

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 12:28 AM, Peter Bengtsson <peter@...> wrote:

<snip />

"I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
developers whereas Django is for users".
I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
is that already what we're doing?

As a guy that provides training for users (which I understands as "developers using the framework"), I tend to agree, it's really a challenge with Zope.
I think we can succeed in this challenge, and we have to, by making it more approachable for developers, pythonic. Yeah, like Python, as Godefroid mentioned about Grok several times at the sprint last week.

Cheers,
Kamon

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[Martijn Faassen-2]

Hey Peter,

Thanks for doing that presentation, I'm glad it went well!

Peter Bengtsson wrote:
[why is Django successful?]
> His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
> features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
> community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
> "I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
> developers whereas Django is for users".

I'm having trouble understanding what the words "user" and "developer"
mean in this context. I thought Django is primarily targeting
developers, saying it's a "web framework for perfectionists with
deadlines". "Users" don't use web frameworks. They probably use bits of
Django, such as the admin UI, to manage content. We don't have the
equivalent of that yet in Grok, but hopefully we'll have that eventually
with the CRUD/BREAD work.

What do you mean by "prioritizing community adaptation"?

> I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
> board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
> is that already what we're doing?

It's one of the reasons I'm so interested in the Back to the Future TTW
project. This is still aiming for people who want to do developer-style
things, but are far less hard-core developers than we can reach now.
It's trying to lower the early stages of the learning curve.

Anyway, I see Grok at trying to aim towards beginning developers and
experienced developers alike, mostly by lowering the learning curve for
everybody (in the easy and the hard parts). We still have quite a ways
to go lowering the learning curve more on the beginning part, I think.

For what it's worth, I personally suspect Django is successful because
it offered a better experience especially for beginners than what was
there at the time in the Python world (due to community attitudes,
integration and documentation), it also tried to offer the virtue of
simplicity for experienced developers (it fit people's brain), and it
also importantly: it arrived at the right time (being placed explicitly
in people's minds as the Python answer to Rails). They've also clearly
mentioned their community very well as it grew.

I think there is a lot to learn from that and I'd like to hear more
about your thoughts on this, Peter. I myself think that if we combine
some of these approaches with the pile of advanced technology we're
sitting on with Zope, we could go quite far.

Regards,

Martijn

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[Martijn Faassen-2]

Kevin Smith wrote:
[snip]
> They were successful due to brilliant marketing (kudos man), a
> mostly-developed python answer to RoR, a good sense of timing and strong
> community development skills.

Heh, good rant. I agree that they'll have to reinvent lots of the stuff
we already have technology-wise.

This bit I feel comfortable enough to freely agree with as I just wrote
something similar myself. :) I do think these were important reasons for
Django's success.

[snip]
> Of course a real advantage for DJango is that they are AppEngine ready.
> Interestingly the Datastore is much more akin to the ZODB than it is to
> an RDB.

I'm hoping that we'll at least start to see some steps this summer of
porting Zope stuff to other Pythons. Once zope.component is there,
grokcore.component can easily follow. With some hacks you could also
make Grok itself start without needing the ZODB. One of the problems is
that Grok needs a lot of eggs to get going, and will probably go over
the App Engine limit.

Regards,

Martijn

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[Martijn Faassen-2]

David Bain wrote:
> It is important to take a lesson from history. The better technology
> doesn't necessary win. It is the technology with the mindshare and the
> marketing.

I agree with this very much. The Grok project in my mind is primarily
two things:

* make it easier to use and learn Zope 3 technology. That's an essential
ingredient to...

* ...be better at marketing Zope 3 technology. I see this as important
an aspect of our project as the technical bits. That's why we have all
the focus on things like the website and documentation.

I'm tech-oriented enough to hope that if we market the strengths of our
technology better, we can get a better mindshare. After all we're
marketing to web developers, and they *do* care about technology. :)

Zope 3 did the strong technology bit but tends to suck at the marketing
bit, which why it got the most uptake from people who were in the Zope
community already. Grok is still in the same position (mostly getting
Zope people) but has the potential, I hope, to go beyond this. I'm
hoping we're seeing the first signs of this.

Regards,

Martijn

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[Peter Bengtsson]

>
>  I'm having trouble understanding what the words "user" and "developer" mean
> in this context. I thought Django is primarily targeting developers, saying
> it's a "web framework for perfectionists with deadlines". "Users" don't use
> web frameworks. They probably use bits of Django, such as the admin UI, to
> manage content. We don't have the equivalent of that yet in Grok, but
> hopefully we'll have that eventually with the CRUD/BREAD work.
>
I think what he meant was that "users" is beginner developers and
"developers" is experienced developers.
(on that note, Jacob did say that Jim Fulton is one of the founding
fathers of web apps)

>  What do you mean by "prioritizing community adaptation"?
>
It's easier to say than to do and I think we've got the right mindset
already but it won't hurt to stress it even further.
Writing documentation, a concise tutorial/book and keep asking
ourselves 'how would a beginner feel if he read/say this?'

We don't need to dumb down Grok but certain things might need another
layer on top. I'm proud of my work on megrok.responseheaders. It's
just an abstraction on top of a rather advanced
decorator-adapter-event-subscription-with-Interfaces but does make it
look less scary for a beginner.

PS. This was written in a rush. You know where my loyalty is, it's
with Grok, but I have to play the devils advocate a bit.


--
Peter Bengtsson,
work www.fry-it.com
home www.peterbe.com
hobby www.issuetrackerproduct.com
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[Martijn Faassen-2]

Peter Bengtsson wrote:
[snip]
> PS. This was written in a rush. You know where my loyalty is, it's
> with Grok, but I have to play the devils advocate a bit.

As a regular devil's advocate I certainly don't mind. We need people
pushing us. If we listen, it will help us do this "community adaptation"
thing. :)

Regards,

Martijn

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[Martijn Faassen-2]

Martijn Faassen wrote:
[snip]
> Anyway, I see Grok at trying to aim towards beginning developers and
> experienced developers alike, mostly by lowering the learning curve for
> everybody (in the easy and the hard parts). We still have quite a ways
> to go lowering the learning curve more on the beginning part, I think.
>
> They've also clearly
> mentioned their community very well as it grew.

Oops, I meant 'managed', not 'mentioned' here.

Regards,

Martijn

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[Lennart Regebro-2]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 12:28 AM, Peter Bengtsson <peter@...> wrote:
> "What key thing do you think made Django so successful?"
> His answer was rather long but never mentioned a single hint about
> features or technology but primarily about how they prioritized the
> community adaptation. As he knew I was there to represent Zope he said
> "I respect what you've done with Grok but I think Zope is for
> developers whereas Django is for users".

Zope 3 definitely is for developers, and a special type of developers
at that. :) Namely those developers that like complexity. Grok is also
for developers, but for developers who want to have a powerful
framwork that they can access quickly and easily.  Zope 3 is like a
jetfighter. Grok is like a jetfighter with fly by wire computer
control. Same power, but much easier ride.

I'm not sure how Django is for "users". Maybe with the definition of
users as "I want to use Django". :)
(Django, btw, is currently in full speed ahead towards redoing many of
Zope2s mistakes, and showed little sign at PyCon of wanting to listen
to others. Django is not a comptetitor of Grok, they will shoot
themselves in the foot, IMO. But don't tell them I said that, because
they will be upset and listen even less to us).

No, "users" want something they can point and click through. Plone
will be that in a year, when we have user-friendly tools for making
content schemas.

> I'm tempted to exit at that but I think it's a point worth taking on
> board if we want to regain the traction we had when zope2 was hot. Or
> is that already what we're doing?

I hope so. I'm hoping to redo my "2007 tour" in 2009, with a talk of
"How Zope got fixed". :)

--
Lennart Regebro: Zope and Plone consulting.
http://www.colliberty.com/
[phone]
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[Jan Ulrich Hasecke-3]

Am 07.05.2008 um 12:46 schrieb Martijn Faassen:

> I'm having trouble understanding what the words "user" and  
> "developer" mean in this context.


I hope that we start to better address these two groups: Developers  
of Zope and Users using Zope to build whatever (be it with a deadline  
or not). Or at least better address the last group.

My impression of the Zope Community is, that it tends to attract  
merely "developers". If you are a simple "user" you are completely  
lost, even if you read Philipps book. You don't get the impression.  
Oh, I'll get it sooner or later. You breathlessly look at it and get  
desperate.

And then there are people, which bore into Zope and start to improve  
it. Sooner or later you are a developer of Zope or you abandoned it  
at all.

Reading the Grok tutorial you get another impression. It looks like  
you can cope with Grok, but still the tutorial and the website does  
not give the impression of Grok being a tool which solves most of my  
ususal problems.

The problem with documentation and marketing is that it does not pay  
for oneself. If you develop a new library you might use it for your  
customer, who will pay you. If you do documentation or marketing  
noone will ever pay you. But the amount of work is huge. I would  
plead for a fund for marketing and documentation.

Grüße
juh

--
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http://www.zope.de





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[Noah Gift]

The problem with documentation and marketing is that it does not pay for oneself.

It depends, because in the case Django, there is a corporation that has licensed the source code, and sells a sister product:  http://www.ellingtoncms.com/  With documentation, there are many technical writing jobs all of the world that pay for material.  You can kill two birds with one stone.

 

If you develop a new library you might use it for your customer, who will pay you. If you do documentation or marketing noone will ever pay you. But the amount of work is huge. I would plead for a fund for marketing and documentation.

Grüße
juh

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http://www.zope.de




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[Martijn Faassen-2]

Hi there,

Jan Ulrich Hasecke wrote:
[snip]
> The problem with documentation and marketing is that it does not pay for
> oneself. If you develop a new library you might use it for your
> customer, who will pay you. If you do documentation or marketing noone
> will ever pay you. But the amount of work is huge. I would plead for a
> fund for marketing and documentation.

On the one hand I'm sympathetic with this idea. I'd love to get paid to
write Grok documentation, something I'm doing anyway as a volunteer.

On the other hand, such an approach worries me. You *can* make a
community contribute a lot of documentation. The Grok project is example
of this: we set up some channels to accept documentation and encouraged
people to write it, and now we have a lot of documentation. It's not
perfect, we could use a lot more, but it does keep getting better.

My worry is that if you set up a fund to do marketing and documentation
  you separate it from the community too much, and take away from the
community the responsibility of having to care about these topics. I'm
convinced that we, as developers of the platform, need to care about
attracting people to our platform (where we can call these people
"users" or "developers").

Writing documentation also helps you think about how things can be done
better. If something is hard to explain, it may be a what we're trying
to explain is too inconsistent or complicated. If it's hard to convince
people to use our stuff, that means we might need improve our stuff,
too! Having a separate group of people do this may lead to a disconnect
that shouldn't be there.

Did someone in the Django project get paid to write its documentation?
What about its marketing? Do we know? It'd be interesting to find out.
We have some historical examples of documentation-writing in the Zope
community too (the Zope 2 book), and naturally the Zope 3 books.

Now I imagine some of my worries of a disconnect could be reduced if we
approach this the right way. What we absolutely want to avoid is to make
community members less involved in documentation and marketing. The
responsibility should ours. We should feel it is ours.

Having people paid to improve Grok (in whatever way) in the process of
doing their daily work (where the goal tends to be the use of Grok for
some purpose) tends to be accepted by community members, I think. It
doesn't distort the operation of the community much. I've been trying to
organize some of my work that way. Having people explicitly being paid
to improve Grok as the primary goal may be another matter (but I'm sure
many of us, including myself, would enjoy being paid for that :).

This whole discussion is of course rather premature, money is not
forthcoming at this moment as far as I'm aware.(I'm Dutch enough to ask
to please do make me aware if I'm wrong! :)

Regards,

Martijn

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[Brandon Craig Rhodes]

Reed O'Brien <reed@...> writes:

> reed:~ reedobrien$ easy_install django
> ...
> sigh.

I'm not sure what your point is, Reed. :-) Grok is *much* worse than
Django in this respect.  If you try to easy_install django, then, as
you've seen, you get an error.  If you try instead to easy_install
Grok, then you get the wrong versions of a hundred packages tossed
merrily into your site-packages, because we don't bother to list
versions in our setup.py - against all known Python convention, I
might add.  You've then wedged yourself: you can't use Grok now by
trying to import it, but you also can no longer run "grokproject" and
have the resulting app run, because the easy_install inside the
buildout apparently becomes terribly confused by the wrong versions of
things sitting in site-packages, and your Grok project will probably
not run at all until you've gotten on #grok, asked about what to do,
and been guided through removing everything starting with "zope" in
your site-packages.

I think I've helped at least two people in exactly this situation on
#grok myself.

Could we move the versions into setup.py? :-) I'm sorry that I keep
asking this, because I know there's always an answer as to why we
don't, but I can never remember.

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[Martijn Faassen-2]

Hi there,

Brandon Craig Rhodes wrote:
[easy_install grok]

> You've then wedged yourself: you can't use Grok now by
> trying to import it, but you also can no longer run "grokproject" and
> have the resulting app run, because the easy_install inside the
> buildout apparently becomes terribly confused by the wrong versions of
> things sitting in site-packages, and your Grok project will probably
> not run at all until you've gotten on #grok, asked about what to do,
> and been guided through removing everything starting with "zope" in
> your site-packages.
>
> I think I've helped at least two people in exactly this situation on
> #grok myself.

Does this still happen? I know I ran into this problem with people last
  year, but we're pinning the eggs down now, so installing 'grokproject'
should be unrelated to what's in the site-packages. You'd think that
it'd get the right versions of the eggs, no matter where they are.

If this is still a problem, could you create a launchpad issue on this?
You could simulate this situation with a virtual-env or by using a
custom installation of python.

Regards,

Martijn

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