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.