Quoth Wichert Akkerman <wichert-5HFq4VzZ2RFeoWH0uzbU5w@public.gmane.org>:

Previously Sebastian Tennant wrote:

...

dzhandle does this, or something like this. It creates a directory structure in $INSTANCE/Products that mirrors /usr/share/zope/Products and then symlinks each individual file in each directory to it's counterpart.

Ugh, I wonder what the reasoning behind that is. Forests of symlinks are not the easiest things to manage.

Yeah it's pretty ugly. No doubt it's because dzhandle(1) tries to be all things to all men: dzhandle is the command-line utility for handling Zope servers, instances and products. It is a system administration tool and a Debian/Ubuntu maintainer’s helper script at the same time: using dzhandle you can manage your Zope installations, create [and remove] instances, add [and remove] Zope products to them [and] start and stop them, [and] it [can] also used by the Debian/Ubuntu Zope packages for their installation and removal. It doesn't mention versions above but it supports multiple versions as well and it _is_ very easy to use. For instance, installing CMF1.5 (and creating the directory structure and forest of symlinks) was a one liner: $ dzhandle -z 2.8 add-product z286one CMFCore CMFDefault ... Ah! And I've just remembered, you can chose whether to create symlink files, directories or create copies. More from dzhandle(1): -t ATECHNIQUE, --addon-install-technique=ATECHNIQUE How to install addons: ‘linked’ means the product or extension directory will be symlinked into the instance home, ‘tree-linked’ means the directory structure will be re-created and then files sym‐ linked, ‘copied’ means the file will be copied into the instance home. I handn't grokked this when I issued the command and 'tree-linked' is the default. All in all, it seems like a pretty useful tool. sdt