In the meantime, I think this list summarizes the adjusted goals well:
* configure; make; make install installation * control script for starting/stopping/debugging zope
I'd like to compare notes on this. Where's the control script that you are using? I'm hoping that we can use (some future evolution of) zdaemon/{zdaemon,zdctl}.py in the Zope 2.7 trunk. This separates the concerns of - the actual server process (Zope/ZEO/ZRS; for ZEO, this is runsvr.py) - a daemon subprocess manager, which restarts the subprocess when it dies, etc. (zdaemon.py) - a tool to control the subprocess manager, telling it to start/restart/stop the server subprocess, etc. (zdctl.py)
* config file for all options including logging, servers, and databases. * real "effective user" support (logfiles, database files, etc. dont get written as root if you start as root). * better support for instance home/software home split * better support for Windows services
I'd like to hear more about this; my zdaemon.py currently doesn't do Windows at all. Where can I peek at your code?
* RPM-building support. * where possible, the banishment of environment variables as configuration.
All of these things save for the last are more or less complete on the "chrism-install-branch" of the Zope trunk. The major missing piece is the fleshing out of the interaction between the configuration system (ZConfig) and Zope itself. It works currently but it needs to be improved and canonized to everyone's liking.
Can you point to where Zope's use of ZConfig is?
Since ZConfig will also used by other ZC software (ZEO, ZRS), there's a bit of back and forth that needs to be done to get everybody to agree on a way to do it. Once that is worked out, and the proposal is cleaned up, I think we can just merge.
Apologies in advance: my refrain seems to be "where's your code for X?" -- there's so much good stuff in your branch that I don't know where to begin, especially not with the Zope part (in ZODB, I know my way around better). --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)