[Zope-CMF] Re: Known working sets II [was: Eggification redux]

[Martijn Faassen]

Tres Seaver wrote:
[snip]
>> This is certainly an interesting approach. I'd be curious how you would 
>> garden this known working set. Martijn makes a pretty good case for 
>> maintaining such working sets close to the package in question (e.g. the 
>> grok egg, the Plone egg, etc.).
> 
> I would argue that this problem is too big for "developer convenience"
> to drive it:  we need concerted effort from the different "communities
> of interest" to manage the problem, in much the same way that Debian /
> Fedora etc. manage their various distribution releases.

I want the ability to make releases of Grok so that when someone writes 
an application against it, it will continue to work, no matter what egg 
releases follow. That's a community of interest, I guess? I just want 
the technical ability to do so, and easily. If it's *not* convenient for 
developers to maintain it, it won't get maintained well by the various 
communities of interest. I think it's important to maintain these lists 
of dependencies close to what they talk about, preferably inside the 
packages themselves.

As far as I know what is required is the ability for grok, in its 
setup.py, to include a list of suggested pinned dependencies (besides, 
and separate from, the normal dependencies). It should also be easy to 
configure buildout to inspect this list. What is also required is a way 
to easily create and maintain this list.

Now I think you're talking about ways to maintain, report and test such 
lists below, but I want to solve my immediate problems first.

I also need this solved preferably today. It's the primary hurt of Grok 
today. Everything else is peanuts.

Of course, if we don't need flexibility to allow application developers 
to diverge from Grok's recommendation, this problem is solved today, 
except for the bit to actually generate the list of dependencies. We can 
simply hardcode them as dependencies in Grok's setup.py and tell 
everybody who wants to use newer versions of eggs for whatever reasons 
in their applications "too bad, wait for the new release".

Regards,

Martijn