[Zope-dev] paver: buildout is utterly doomed

[Baiju M]

Martijn Faassen 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.

Our company (ZeOmega) is willing to volunteer to do this work.
Jeff Rush, who presented a tutorial about Buildout in last PyCon
will be helping us to create this site [1].

I think it is better not to associate Buildout with zope.org domain.
So, either we can create a new domain www.buildout.org
or if you all agree a subdomain of python.org : buildout.python.org

I hope we can use ZF's server infrastructure for hosting,
otherwise we can also provide it.

BTW, we already started creating some content here:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/buildout/
http://wiki.python.org/moin/buildout/newsite_notes

[1] http://us.pycon.org/2008/tutorials/EggsRush/

Regards,
Baiju M