[Zope-dev] Zope 2.6 planning - call for contributors!

[Tim Hicks]

<See below>

> This isn't exciting by any means unless you're one of the people who
> package Zope up for distribution, or maybe you're one of the people who
> manage lots of little Zopes on one system; but I'd like to revive the
> "grand unified Zope installation and control" proposal that has been
> floated by many people (including me) in one form or another for some
> time.  Wikiwise, this would wrap up
> http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ZopeStartupProvisions and
> http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/InstallationAndConfiguration,
> at least.
>
> To summarize, this would involve
>
> - an expanded build program with an installation scheme that would allow
> multiple versions of Zope to be present on the same system
>
> - making that installation 'secure by default'
>
> - a registry of Zope installations and one of instances and their
> configuration settings
>
> - a 'zopectl' program or similar that would be able to start and stop
> instances
>
> - a 'zopeinstance' program or similar that would become the
> _recommended_ way of setting up Zope, by creating an INSTANCE_HOME
>
> It would be nice if
>
> - the same framework could apply to Zope 3, maybe taking care of that
> piece ahead of time
>
> I'm more than willing to head this up, though I question how long we
> have before 2.6 to do so.

Matt,

I read 'InstallationAndConfiguration' page, and it made me wonder exactly
how that aspect would work.
Assuming some sort of distutils based setup [1], would something like the
following be the desired approach? [2]

#Installs zope in it's current simplest configuration.  Equivalent of
"python wo_pcgi.py"
$ python setup.py

#Equivalent of w_pcgi.py
$ python setup.py pcgi

#Creates SOFTWARE_HOME or ZOPE_HOME (I'm not sure if there's a difference,
or which one I would mean)
#I guess it would just do this in the current directory
$ python setup.py zope_home

#Creates an INSTANCE_HOME by prompting the user for a path (if not already
given) to install to
#Add's instance to some sort of registry [3]
$ python setup.py instance [/path/to/instance]

I don't really know what else to think about.  I haven't ever used ZEO, so I
don't have the first clue about that side of things.

So, as you may be able to tell, I'm a little hazy on many (most?) aspects of
this install/configure idea, but I'm quite keen on it.  I've tried to post
something that is at least mildly useful more in the hope that it may keep
the proposal rolling rather than as a 'me too' or '+1' (as Paul E already
told us off for ;-) ).  I guess, at the end of the day, I can't really get
around the fact it's a 'me too' without any coding commitment [4].

Do you have any concrete ideas for this?

cheers

tim

[1] I've never used distutils before
[2] Feel more than free to knock down and tear up anything I've said here
:-)
[3] Would this 'registry' be some sort of flat text file, or perhaps a zodb
store, or...?
[4] Apart from the fact that I've never written anything other than web-code
(so my python probably isn't up to it), I can't commit time at the moment
due to my degree having to take priority :-(.  If there were any simply
odd-jobs, testing, something I couldn't ballsup, I'd like to help if I can.