- ploneout (http://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/ploneout/trunk) is really an environment that Plone 3 core developers could (should?) use as a consistent way of setting up a Zope 2.10 instance with Plone 3 and all dependencies. It uses svn:externals quite extensively to pull in Plone's source code into src/ (the eggs) and products/ (the products) with the intention that this is the code being developed. Ploneout's README.txt has more information about this scenario.

To through in an extra angle in this discussion, I would like to contribute the following thoughts. Unless Utopia really exists I think developers all have their own thoughts about setting up their development environment. In my opinion buildout's target should be deployment of complex production systems. I had to read the buildout documentation twice to even get a grip of it and yesterday I wondered around in a forest of recipes in ploneout. Although I see the value of buildout, copying over the entire buildout to setup a second sandbox, seems like a waste of disk space to me. We work on quite a number of different projects at once and want to be able to reproduce a working instance (running the production Data.fs preferably). To service our environment we (mainly the van Rees brothers) wrote instancemanager. We expect a minimal set of requirements: - Python installed - Zope libraries installed next to each other, e.g. /usr/local/zope/2.10.2, each version in a separate folder. Using instancemanager you can: * Create / Start / Stop / Restart instances * Backup / Restore / Pack instance databases * Install Products * Run tests * Generate Apache VirtualHost configs * Easy upgrade Zope versions During the Snowsprint we'll finish Windows compatibility and creation of Z3 instances. Minimal configuration in ~/.instancemanager/userdefaults.py to show instancemanager which zope's are available. zope_location_template = '/usr/local/zope/%(zope_verion)' Each instance is then configured using a project.py. ~/.instancemanager/demo.py Inside this project file we can define all needed instance configuration options: * Initial user and password * Portnumbers * Zope / Python version used * Whether to use zeo, and how many zeo clients * Sources to install in the Products or lib/python folder - symlink_sources : Allow svn checkouts of products to be linked. - symlinkbundle_sources : Allow for svn checkouts of bundles (3.0) - archive_sources: Allow for official release tar files to be extracted. - archivebundle_sources: Allow for official release tar bundles to be extracted. Sources are defined as a list of dicts: archive_sources = [ {'url':'http://www.zope.org/Members/shh/DocFinderTab/1.0.1/DocFinderTab-1.0.1.tar.gz'}, {'url':'http://plone.org/products/clouseau/releases/0.7.1/Clouseau.0.7.1.zip'}, ] Here I defined two developers tools that need to be downloaded and extracted to the Products folder of my instance. symlinkbundle_sources = [ {'url':'https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/bundles/3.0',}, {'url':'https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/bundles/3.0-lib', 'pylib':True,}, ] Here I define the 3.0 bundle of Zope Products that will be symlinked and for the second we added the key 'pylib' a value of True to indicate this set of sources need to be linked in the lib/python folder. Sources are downloaded to a configurable location, instancemanager has set the following defaults: archive_basedir_template = /home/myuser/downloads archivebundle_basedir_template = /home/myuser/downloads symlink_basedir_template = /home/myuser/svn symlinkbundle_basedir_template = /home/myuser/svn Downloading happens only once, to limit bandwidth. Again most developers are pretty demanding about setting up a development environment. Here at Zest most of us are comfortable with instancemanager. There's an egg available in the cheeseshop, but for the latest features you can also checkout https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/instancemanager/trunk Kind regards, Jean-Paul