This month's tip is a collection of documents that cover the techniques for testing and upgrading your ZenPacks for ensuring Zenoss 3.0 compatibility.  Zenoss 3.0 includes a number of significant technology upgrades, especially the upgrade to Python 2.6 and Zope 2.12.

To help with this transition, we've published the ZenPack Conversion Tasks for Zenoss 3.0 document in HTML, EPUB and PDF formats.  This document covers the updated requirements and techniques for upgrading your ZenPacks.

The Python 2.6 upgrade specifically changes a number of APIs that some ZenPacks used (ie. replacing SimpleJSON with JSON) and 2.5 and earlier ZenPacks will need to be recompiled from Python 2.4 at a minimum. Some ZenPacks may work by renaming them and removing the "py-2.4" from their names (ie. "ZenPacks.community.Blah-1.0-py2.4.egg" to "ZenPacks.community.Blah-1.0.egg").  This technique is not recommended except for testing basic compatibility, but works with some simple ZenPacks.

If you are still using .ZIP-style ZenPacks, these were deprecated in the Zenoss 2.5 series and are no longer supported with Zenoss 3.0.  To upgrade these, please refer to the Migrating ZIP ZenPacks to EGGs document for instruction.

Community ZenPacks that are currently known to have Zenoss 3.0 compatibility issues are documented here: 3.0-Incompatible Community ZenPacks

Please check the zenoss-zenpacks forum for ZenPack upgrade discussions and the ZenPack Development development area for futher documentation.  Please send any updated ZenPacks to community@zenoss.com and we'll help get them published.