Dear Python community, The Zope 3 development team is proud to announce the second alpha release of Zope X3 3.0.0. Zope X3 is the next major Zope release and has been written from scratch based on the latest software design patterns and the experiences of Zope 2. The "X" in the name stands for "experimental", since this release does not try to provide any backward-compatibility to Zope 2. Download http://zope.org/Products/ZopeX3 Installation instructions for both Windows and Un*x/Linux are now available in the top level README.txt of the distribution. Changes since alpha 1 - Several packages were included in the first alpha since other code had several dependencies on their interfaces. This code has been refactored into sub-packages which are no longer part of the release. As a result, this distribution has fewer packages than alpha 1. Excluded packages include the indexing and fssync. - Some bugs were fixed that were reported by testers. This includes problems with the installation of a distribution. Goals While the first alpha release concentrated on testing our packaging tool and putting a process for releases into place, we would like to ask anyone to test this release a thoroughly as possible. The next release will be the first beta (probably next week) at which time the API freezes! Even if you are not interested in Zope you should test the building process of the distribution, since the packaging tool might be of great interest to the entire Python community. Please send any bug reports and comments to zope3-dev@zope.org! Thank you very much in advance for your help! Contributors Jim Fulton, Marius Gedminas, Fred Drake, Philipp von Weitershausen, Stephan Richter, Dmitry Vasiliev, Eckart Hertzler Thanks to everyone!