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

[Tres Seaver]

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Tres Seaver wrote:
> 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.

I will be ready shortly to merge this branch to the 2.9 branch, the 2.10
branch, and the Zope2 trunk.  Here is how I have tested it so far:

  - All unit tests pass, with the same count (and deprecation warnings!)
    in my sandbox for this change as for the 2.9 head.

  - I have made an 'sdist' tarball from the sandboxy, and then been able
    to run './configure ... && make && makd test && make install' from
    the directory in which I unpacked the tarball.

  - I was also able to create an out-of-tree build from that unpacked
    directory.

  - Instances created from the tarball can run unit tests for their
    products via 'bin/zopectl test'.

  - The site starts up fine, and I can add content via the ZMI, etc.

Remaining TODOs:

  - I would like to have a few more folks try out working with the
    tarball, which I have uploaded to zope.org:

     http://www.zope.org/Members/tseaver/Zope-2.9.4-retire_zpkg.tgz

  - I should find and update any documentation on making a release to
    reflect the new process.  I don't think any of that documentation is
    in the source tree:  does anyone have a pointer to it?

  - Make the corresponding changes to the Windows build machinery.

Comments?


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