It’s Alive!

Even though our GSoC students didn’t had as much success as I hoped, they did contribute some valuable patches that pointed on the right direction.

This week, with the Plone Conference 2008 going on in Washington and the fact I did not attend this conference, I finally made enough time available to get my hands back into Zope again.

So it’s my pleasure to report that after about a week of hard work and a handful of workarounds that will need future cleaning, Zope 2 does now startup under Python 2.6.

My expectation with this now out of my way is that other developers will start looking at adjusting third-party applications (hint: Plone) to run on Python 2.6 as well.

The code is available on the gsoc-python-2.5 branch of the Zope repository, and the lucky guys at the Plone Conference will be amongst the first to hear the good news through Matthew Wilkes, which registered for a stealth Lightning Talk which should get at least some people puzzled. I would love to be there and see their faces when Matthew unveils the surprise.

Big thanks go to Tres Seaver for helping me figure out a change needed in Zope’s private version of ‘medusa’ and to Ranjith Kannikara, our GSoC student through the Zope Foundation, and his friends which did a good chunk of the hard work, namely figuring out changes to the C-based ‘Acquisition’ module and cleaning up string exceptions.

NOTE: This is not intended for production yet, it is just a technology preview to get developers to try out and start porting their own projects. Many bugs still exist, some of which might take up to a month to get fixed. Most importantly, the RestrictedPython implementation has not been fully audited for the new builtins and language constructs introduced since Python 2.4.

Bootstrapping Progress

Our GSoC Student Ranjith Kannikara has already started making progress on his effort to get Zope 2 running atop of Python 2.5.

As for myself, I've managed to compile and start Zope trunk on Python 2.5, and just the fact it starts up fine is very assuring.

To help Ranjith, and to keep track of progress myself I have set up a buildbot that will be running the tests twice a day. The results look promising. But I'm skipping some tests (ZODB, ZConfig and ZEO).

Lastly, we are still in the process of getting Ranjith commit access to svn.zope.org. He already submitted the documentation, and now he just has to submit his ssh keys.

I've invited Ranjith to post to this blog, which he says he will be doing frequently.

That's it for this week. See you next friday!

Zope Porting Announcement

Due to growing interest in porting Zope to different versions of Python and different Python implementations, I have started this blog to help track the efforts.

Last year, the Zope Foundation, through the Google Summer of Code program had a sponsored student working on porting Zope 3 to Python 2.5.

This year, we have another student, this time working on porting Zope 2 to Python 2.5, and another student through the Python Software Foundation will be working on porting Zope to Jython.

Expect to see status reports following shortly, as this year's Summer of Code program officially begins on May 26.

In addition to this blog, I've created a Zope Porting group on Google Groups, for more general discussion. If you're interested on helping out with porting Zope to Python 2.5, Jython, or even PyPy or IronPython, please join this group and contribute!