[Zope-dev] paver: buildout is utterly doomed

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I just found out about this site:

http://www.blueskyonmars.com/projects/paver/

I know that the author has used buildout in the past. He apparently 
decided to roll his own.

I have no idea what the technical qualities of paver are. To get your 
attention, let me spell out a strongly worded and opinionated message 
nonetheless:

zc.buildout is toast. It's on the way out now. Paver is going to compete 
it away and buildout is doomed to be a niche project only used by weird 
zope people.

That's strongly worded. I'll admit it's drastically overstated. It's 
based on virtually no technical information! But that's exactly how many 
programmers will judge the projects: on community aspects, and not 
primarily technical.

Paver has this in its favor:

* Paver actually has a nice website that speaks to Python programmers of 
simplicity. zc.buildout has cheeseshop page with a lot of doctest 
documentation people have said was hard to understand. (including the 
author of paver!)

* the author is well connected in the Python community. I'd say 
TurboGears and Pylons people are likely to go for Paver.

* it's *already* showing up on programmer's sites like 
programming.reddit.com, where I just found it. Nobody bothers to link to 
buildout, as there's no easily digestable message about it available.

So, I fear very much that this, or some other alternative, will wash 
away the undoubtedly more feature-rich and technically robust 
zc.buildout, if buildout doesn't present itself better. Without better 
presentation, fast, buildout is doomed to be a Zope-specific thing forever.

You Can Save Buildout!

So, who is up to make a nice clean looking website and a few tutorials 
for buildout? It needs a website. Buildout has been around for a few 
years without a proper website already, Paver for 5 minutes and it's got 
one. I'm not going to do it, but someone should.

Just to be sure, I certainly *won't* be doing this. Jim won't either, 
and I don't expect it from him. Let him write great code, not make 
websites. So don't sit back and hope someone else will do it, as they 
won't. If nobody else can bother to step up, Paver probably deserves to 
win. If you're intereested, I think we already have a nice buildout for 
deploying grok.zope.org that can probably be adapted. The repoze people 
have a nice site too, so you could go ask there.

Alternatively we start to figure out how to convert our buildouts to 
Paver. :)

Regards,

Martijn