[Zope-dev] Re: Zope without Zope

[Martijn Faassen]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Friday 16 November 2007, Jim Fulton wrote:
>> Something is broken here and it needs to be fixed.
> 
> Well, the easiest solution would be to remove those misbehaving distributions 
> from the cheeseshop.
> 
> However, I think we kid ourselves if we think that the cheeseshop will always 
> provide a stable set by default. This would be like saying that all packages 
> from all versions of one Linux distribution are in one repository and nothing 
> will break.

It'd work if setuptools supported a 'give me a version that works' 
feature. You'd just have to specify the working dependencies along with 
the loose dependencies in setup.py.

You'd still have potential problems if you use multiple packages that 
share a dependency, and the working version they suggest conflicts. It's 
then up to the end user to break the conflict. Theoretically, as long as 
you'd follow the loose dependencies and we maintain those well, things 
would still work.

> I can even think of a trivial example. Let's say package A works only with 
> Python 2.x and package B works only with Python 3.0a. The supported Python 
> versions are not part of the meta-data of a package. As a naive user, I want 
> to use both, but can't.

Heh, Python 3 will cause way more problems than this. We should avoid 
releasing Python 3 versions for our packages for that reason. If you 
release them, I'd suggest picking a different name for the egg 
altogether - that's what is typically done in Linux distributions if 
there are multiple incompatible versions of a library (GTK 1 and 2, for 
instance).

Regards,

Martijn