Stephan Richter wrote:
It is finally here! Thanks goes to everyone who involved!
January 29, 2009 - The Zope 3 development team announces the Zope 3.4.0 release.
Excellent! I have to say, though, that the download process is quite confusing. Let's say I'm a Pythonista who wants to try out Zope 3. Google sends me here: http://download.zope.org/zope3.4/ After the release overview, the document tells me Zope is now distributed as eggs. I'm familiar with eggs and I like them. Then it talks about the KGS and my buildout. It tells me how to modify my buildout configuration. Wait, what's a buildout and how do I configure it? Hmm, none of the links about the KGS tell me much about this buildout thing. I can already tell it's gonna be hard to learn about Zope... Well, I'll skip over the KGS stuff and see what I can figure out anyway. Ok, I can follow the easy_install directions. I'm really savvy and I'll even use virtualenv to do it, even though the document doesn't mention that. I already have the habit of using virtualenv whenever I use easy_install. So, following the directions, I create a project called HelloWorld. I try to fire it up. Uh-oh... zope.configuration.config.ConfigurationExecutionError: <class 'zope.configuration.exceptions.ConfigurationError'>: Help Topic definition [...]/transaction-1.0a1-py2.5.egg/transaction/README.txt does not exist So it breaks before even starting the server. This is really trying my patience, but I study a lot of web pages and discuss the problem with other developers over a few days. Following a friend's recommendation, I add the following two lines to the [buildout] section of buildout.cfg generated by zopeproject: extends = http://download.zope.org/zope3.4/3.4.0/versions.cfg versions = versions After running bin/buildout again, the server finally starts! Of course, what I see when the server starts is opaque and uninviting, but I'll leave that for another discussion. :-) So, my question is: what should the download page *really* say? Consider that existing developers of Zope 3 don't actually need this page at all since they already use zc.buildout. This page's audience, then, is people who know little about zc.buildout, let alone the KGS. Newbies need straightforward directions to follow. Shane