Martijn Faassen wrote:
Hi there,
I just found out about this site:
http://www.blueskyonmars.com/projects/paver/
I know that the author has used buildout in the past. He apparently decided to roll his own.
I have no idea what the technical qualities of paver are. To get your attention, let me spell out a strongly worded and opinionated message nonetheless:
zc.buildout is toast. It's on the way out now. Paver is going to compete it away and buildout is doomed to be a niche project only used by weird zope people.
That's strongly worded. I'll admit it's drastically overstated. It's based on virtually no technical information! But that's exactly how many programmers will judge the projects: on community aspects, and not primarily technical.
Paver has this in its favor:
* Paver actually has a nice website that speaks to Python programmers of simplicity. zc.buildout has cheeseshop page with a lot of doctest documentation people have said was hard to understand. (including the author of paver!)
* the author is well connected in the Python community. I'd say TurboGears and Pylons people are likely to go for Paver.
* it's *already* showing up on programmer's sites like programming.reddit.com, where I just found it. Nobody bothers to link to buildout, as there's no easily digestable message about it available.
So, I fear very much that this, or some other alternative, will wash away the undoubtedly more feature-rich and technically robust zc.buildout, if buildout doesn't present itself better. Without better presentation, fast, buildout is doomed to be a Zope-specific thing forever.
You Can Save Buildout!
So, who is up to make a nice clean looking website and a few tutorials for buildout? It needs a website. Buildout has been around for a few years without a proper website already, Paver for 5 minutes and it's got one. I'm not going to do it, but someone should.
Our company (ZeOmega) is willing to volunteer to do this work. Jeff Rush, who presented a tutorial about Buildout in last PyCon will be helping us to create this site [1]. I think it is better not to associate Buildout with zope.org domain. So, either we can create a new domain www.buildout.org or if you all agree a subdomain of python.org : buildout.python.org I hope we can use ZF's server infrastructure for hosting, otherwise we can also provide it. BTW, we already started creating some content here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/buildout/ http://wiki.python.org/moin/buildout/newsite_notes [1] http://us.pycon.org/2008/tutorials/EggsRush/ Regards, Baiju M