[Grok-dev] Python UK meeting and Django

[Brandon Craig Rhodes]

Tim Terlegård <tim.terlegard at valentinewebsystems.se> writes:

> You can't run easy_install in a buildout, it doesn't make much
> sense.  I'm not sure I understand what you mean.  You should just
> easy_install grokproject and use that, not easy_install grok or
> anything else.

The issue is that, because so many Grok products are willing to be
easy_installed these days, many novice users simply try "easy_install
<foo>" without even looking at any documentation.  I mean, look at
Reed - he just tried it with Django, whose docs don't mention
easy_install at all. :-)

And people wanting to try out Grok before have done with Grok exactly
the same thing that Reed just did with Django: ignored the fact that
the documentation says *not* to easy_install it, and tried it anyway.
With Django this at least fails cleanly.  With Grok it downloads
dozens of packages, looking busy and efficient like it's accomplishing
something the user wants, then when they try to "import grok" it
(currently; this changes month to month) reports an error with a
symbol in martian.

I am happy to report that Martijn is exactly correct; the module
versions installed by "easy_install grok" no longer prevent the user
from finding out that he's supposed to use "grokproject", and when he
does, the buildout environment ignores the wrong-versioned packages in
site-packages which, while they take up space, don't prevent Grok from
then running successfully.

I have a slight guess that some novices probably expect "grokproject"
to be a script that comes with "grok", until they realize that it's
its own module rather than just being something that "comes with" the
"grok" module itself.

-- 
Brandon Craig Rhodes   brandon at rhodesmill.org   http://rhodesmill.org/brandon