[Zope-dev] Re: buildout 'versions' and 'develop' conflict

[Martijn Faassen]

Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> 
> On Feb 26, 2008, at 9:38 AM, Christophe Combelles wrote:
> 
>> Martijn Faassen a écrit :
>>> (...)
>>
>> The two easiest choices are 1) issue a clear warning in stderr, or 2) 
>> rename 'develop' to something else.
> 
> So, the people that understand either get spammed with warning messages 
> every build, or have to change all their builds in order to accommodate 
> your thinking?  We all know what the solution is, it was supplied at the 
> beginning of the thread:
> 
> [versions]
> mynewpin = somenewversion_dev

It's longer and shorter:

* longer: create a 'versions' section if it isn't there yet, and point 
to it from [buildout] with 'versions'. (the versions section may not be 
there yet if this buildout.cfg extends another one with such a section)

* shorter:

[versions]
mynewpin =

Removes the pin. In the absence of a pin, it will pick the newest 
version. Or perhaps I'm wrong about this somehow, as I couldn't get the 
test case to work when I added it to buildout. :)

There are two problems with this solution, both usability related:

* People tend to be surprised when they first run into this. The 
solution is non-obvious in the face of external version lists. It can be 
expected people will be surprised in the future.

* You make people type more, repeating a version name, in a common case 
(in the face of KGS)

So, we're looking at a way to increase the usability of a common task: 
hack on a package without having to understand its place in a 
potentially very complicated dependency structure.

The simplest solution I see to these problems is to add another option 
to buildout that does both at the same time (and perhaps override all 
other constraints), and direct people to that should they wish to 
develop a package.

The name 'develop' was picked which is understandable historically, and 
it can't be changed. It's consistent with the behavior of easy_install.

Regards,

Martijn