-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Tres Seaver wrote:
I worked last night with folks from the Fedora Extras project who were trying to package Zope 2.9.3 for FC5+. Because they were working from the release tarball, generated by 'zpkg', much of my knowledge about how the build process works (or doesn't) was invalid:
- The Makefile generated by 'zpkg' does not have bugfixes / features which have been made to the 'Makefile' created by 'configure' in a checkout.
- The 'install.py' script has subtly-different semantics from the 'setup.py' script in the checkout. In particular, it was hard to figure out how to get the installed libraries correct for the x86_64 package.
- We have had a bunch of bugs since 2.9 related to the 'zpkg'-based build, some related to lost features and other to various kinds of breakage (see #1967, #1968, #1996, #2030, #2081, #2082, #2083, #2121).
- Working inside the 'zpkg'-generated tarball is *very* confusing, even for experienced Zope developers: "Where is the source?" is a frequent cry in such cases.
All of this is due to the fact that none of the maintainers of Zope2 is also a conusmer of the zpkg-gnereated releases; those consumers are the downstream packagers and sysadmins who have no idea how to work in that setup, and who can't even (easily) get help on it from the Zope developer community.
I believe that the extra flexibility which zpkg is intended to provide (dependency-based subset distributions, primarily) would be better served by moving Zope to use eggs, and that we should thus retire zpkg as the means for building Zope2 releases. Instead, we should recreate the version of the 'inst' stuff removed in the 2.9 beta cycle, and update it for any changes to the tree made since then.
I volunteer to do the work, assuming the community concurs.
I will be ready shortly to merge this branch to the 2.9 branch, the 2.10 branch, and the Zope2 trunk. Here is how I have tested it so far: - All unit tests pass, with the same count (and deprecation warnings!) in my sandbox for this change as for the 2.9 head. - I have made an 'sdist' tarball from the sandboxy, and then been able to run './configure ... && make && makd test && make install' from the directory in which I unpacked the tarball. - I was also able to create an out-of-tree build from that unpacked directory. - Instances created from the tarball can run unit tests for their products via 'bin/zopectl test'. - The site starts up fine, and I can add content via the ZMI, etc. Remaining TODOs: - I would like to have a few more folks try out working with the tarball, which I have uploaded to zope.org: http://www.zope.org/Members/tseaver/Zope-2.9.4-retire_zpkg.tgz - I should find and update any documentation on making a release to reflect the new process. I don't think any of that documentation is in the source tree: does anyone have a pointer to it? - Make the corresponding changes to the Windows build machinery. Comments? Tres. - -- =================================================================== Tres Seaver +1 202-558-7113 tseaver@palladion.com Palladion Software "Excellence by Design" http://palladion.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFEnUDU+gerLs4ltQ4RAr+hAJ9bw9T1PaBTc6JDUNdCdQTYVuFKcQCfcDFB Qe7cCO/QmBnF/92vPaPuFO8= =OEKK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----