On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 02:15:28PM -0500, Brian Lloyd wrote:
I just installed zope 2.3.0 for Linux, from the tar file downloaded from the Zope site. Went great. I noticed in the docs that a pre-compiled binary of Python comes with the zope tarball in a bin subdir. Well, my question is -- since I am new to python, have done a lot with perl -- the binary that comes with zope is 1.5 megs, while I already have another binary that came with my mandrake 7.2 system, same version, 1.5.2, in /usr/bin. It is only 423k. Are there certain modules or whatever added to the binary that comes with Zope that I need to use? Therefore, should I replace the /usr/bin/python with the python binary that is in the Zope bin dir? What effect would that have on my python installation? Could someones shed some light on this for me? Any help much appreciated.
The binary releases come with a pre-compiled and self-contained Python interpreter and library. The intent of that is so that people don't have to worry about any existing Python install on the machine. The packaged one contains everything needed to run Zope, but doesn't interfere with or require anything of any other Python on the machine.
You do not want to replace the existing python binary in /usr/bin with the Zope one - if you want to upgrade the Python on the box you should use a distribution from www.python.org, which will ensure that all of the various dependencies (like the Python libraries) are updated correctly.
Once more, I will flog a dying equine. Please change the binary release policy. While I understand your motivation, I think you are not helping the people you mean to. On the download page, encourage people to try the source distribution first! The current download text makes it sound like source is only there for uber-geeks; in fact, a source install is no harder than a binary install, assuming a working 1.5.2 python. Then recommend that if for any reason the source install does not work, they may wish to try to get a binary from their operating system vendor. Only then should they use a binary install from zope.org. And there needs to be prominent documentation of which python will be invoked and where extension modules must be placed. Reasons: 1) A few people notice there are multiple pythons and get really concerned. 2) More people do not notice that there are multiple pythons, try something in python which won't work in zope and get really confused. 3) You now have multiple extension module directories, and the zope one is in a fairly surprising place and is undocumented. If a user ever needs to add an extension module, it will probably be put in a place zope cannot find it. While that could be handled by symbolic links, your assumption that they cannot handle the install process in zope's tarball ought to make it clear that they cannot do symbolic links.
Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com
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