[Zope-dev] Proposal: Scrap zpkg for Zope2 releases

[Tres Seaver]

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I worked last night with folks from the Fedora Extras project who were
trying to package Zope 2.9.3 for FC5+.  Because they were working from
the release tarball, generated by 'zpkg', much of my knowledge about how
the build process works (or doesn't) was invalid:

  - The Makefile generated by 'zpkg' does not have bugfixes / features
    which have been made to the 'Makefile' created by 'configure' in
    a checkout.

  - The 'install.py' script has subtly-different semantics from the
    'setup.py' script in the checkout.  In particular, it was hard
    to figure out how to get the installed libraries correct for the
    x86_64 package.

  - We have had a bunch of bugs since 2.9 related to the 'zpkg'-based
    build, some related to lost features and other to various kinds
    of breakage (see #1967, #1968, #1996, #2030, #2081, #2082, #2083,
    #2121).

  - Working inside the 'zpkg'-generated tarball is *very* confusing,
    even for experienced Zope developers:  "Where is the source?"
    is a frequent cry in such cases.

All of this is due to the fact that none of the maintainers of Zope2 is
also a conusmer of the zpkg-gnereated releases;  those consumers are the
downstream packagers and sysadmins who have no idea how to work in that
setup, and who can't even (easily) get help on it from the Zope
developer community.

I believe that the extra flexibility which zpkg is intended to provide
(dependency-based subset distributions, primarily) would be better
served by moving Zope to use eggs, and that we should thus retire zpkg
as the means for building Zope2 releases.  Instead, we should recreate
the version of the 'inst' stuff removed in the 2.9 beta cycle, and
update it for any changes to the tree made since then.

I volunteer to do the work, assuming the community concurs.


Tres.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 202-558-7113          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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