I just returned from the San Jose Goldegg Packaging Sprint kindly hosted by Cignex . The sprint was attended by more than a dozen people including Paul Everitt, Joel Burton, Kapil Thangavelu, Fred Drake, Rob Miller, Geoff Davis, Michel Pelletier, Ben Saller, Alex Limi, Casey Duncan, Gautham and Sangeetha from Cignex, and a fellow named David. The sprint began on Monday Nov. 7 and lasted through Friday Nov. 11.

The sprint was broken up into two teams. Fred, Casey and I comprised "Team A", which was responsible for making it possible to package and distribute Zope products nicely. "Team B" had everyone else and they did various and sundry things.

Team A... Casey and I worked on the Basket product that I recently released, which allows Zope products to be packaged as Python eggs. Fred did the harder work of making sure that future releases of key Zope components like ZConfig, ZCML, and some other various parts of Zope 3 are able to deal with packages that aren't on the filesystem but instead might be packaged in zipfiles. I was really happy with the outcome of what we did; it will likely serve as the basis for a new packaging "regime" to be introduced in Zope 2.10 as well as serving as a stopgap solution until that version is released. Our scratchpad and outcomes wiki during the sprint is available on the plone.org wiki .

Team B folks seemed to have split into several subteams. Rob Miller continued the work he started in Fredericksburg, which involved making Plone work on top of CMF 2.0. That looked like it was nasty work. Ben and Geoff worked on a tool that they alternately considered naming "Plone-O-Matic", "Projector", or "Skeletor" which had as its goal creating best-practice Product skeletons for new CMF/Plone development. I think Kapil, Sangeetha, Gautham, Michel and David worked on XMLIO as well as some other components that I think I didn't quite understand . Alex and Ben also were working on putting together a "planet.plone.org" website. Joel and Paul worked on coordination as well as a marketing site for Plone involving lots of XML content.

The Cignex folks couldn't have been any nicer. We stayed at a serviceable hotel and they fed us til we could eat no more. Many thanks for their kindness.

Apart from work, lots of beverages consumed by all and lots of laughs had by everyone, as is usual at sprints of this kind. Hopefully we'll have another soon.