[Zope-dev] paver: buildout is utterly doomed

[Kent Tenney]

>From Kevin's blog

http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2008/04/22/paver-and-the-building-distribution-deployment-etc-of-python-projects/
(http://tinyurl.com/68sz6u)

"The idea is to use zc.buildout's machinery, not reinvent it."

On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 8:44 AM, Martijn Faassen <faassen at startifact.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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