Blockers for Plone 6.1 beta

[mauritsvanrees]

We want a first Plone 6.1 beta release soon. The distribution stuff has landed, which was the biggest blocker. Some items still remain that I would want:

• Jenkins is really unstable lately, especially with the robot tests. I don't feel comfortable making a release currently. Some robotframework-related version pins were upgraded in buildout.coredev, but after a while reverted because of instability, but they remain unstable. Work is underway, and even almost finished, to port the robot tests to Playwright, which should help. See mostly Port robot tests #4019 and Update robotframework-browser version (and dependencies) buildout.coredev#954.
• Zope 5.11 is out since today. We want that in. I tried a checkout of Zope already, which showed one error which I am fixing here. Should be easy enough.
• Document distributions in the 6.1 upgrade guide. documentation#1733
• The new make install fails when there is a version override buildout.coredev#963

Nice to have:

• Python 3.13 is out and Zope 5.11 supports it. I was trying that out in the same coredev PR and this showed that we need to update all kinds of version pins, especially in the case of packages that have C code or Rust, as only the latest releases will have binary wheels for Python 3.13. Once we can actually get a full build, it remains to be seen how many test failures there are, especially due to removed core Python modules and other code. Definitely not a blocker though.
• Wesley is busy with PRs across several repositories to get working copy support for the Plone Site root. Since it touches so many repositories, it would be good to have this in before the beta. Not a full blocker, but it feels close.

In the last week of October and the first full week of November I am moving to a new house, so I will be busy with other stuff and try to take a break from Plone. And afterwards I need to prepare for three talks at the Plone conference, so I won't have much time then either. So I hope we can get this sorted out in the next two weeks.

[stevepiercy]

It does us no good to release software that many developers don't know how to develop further for their clients because we don't publish adequate documentation. Please consider adding as Plone 6.1 beta blockers:

• Install
• Create a project
• Create an add-on
• Manage add-ons
• Test
• [Insert topic here]

These are the core topics for developers. Each topic may have its specific context, such as for Volto, Classic UI, or backend.

[gforcada]

On the 3.13 side, I installed Python 3.13 on all Jenkins nodes and jobs are already failing 🙃

https://jenkins.plone.org/job/plone-6.1-python-3.13/1/console

[gforcada]

@mauritsvanrees the Jenkins job to test your PR against b.coredev 🍀

https://jenkins.plone.org/job/pull-request-6.1-3.13/1/console

[mauritsvanrees]

I have added as blocker my own PR for adding distribution info to the upgrade documentation: plone/documentation#1733

And an issue with version overrides that I need to work on plone/buildout.coredev#963