[Zope-dev] Don't have "Zope 2" hard-specify its versions!

[Hanno Schlichting]

Chris Withers wrote:
> Dieter Maurer wrote:
>> Tres has earlier proposed a meta egg to represent "versions.cfg" in
>> a setuptools only (non buildout) environment.
>>
>> A meta egg is an egg that only list dependencies and does not contain
>> code of its own.
> 
> Indeed, so we'd need 2 eggs for Zope 2 :-(
> 
> Something I bumped into recently:
> 
> If the Zope 2 egg actually hard-specifies its dependencies, how do I 
> upgrade any of those dependencies to newer versions that fix bugs i may 
> have encountered/fixed?

You roll your own meta egg. You cannot override hard version
specifications inside a setup.py.

In all other debates we seemed to agree on not over specifying
requirements in setup.py files, I wonder why anybody still tries to
follow this route.

Let's see what other people who want to support easy_install do: They
require you to use virtualenv and create a links page, which has all the
dependencies in all the required versions on it:

http://pylonshq.com/download/0.9.7/
http://www.turbogears.org/2.0/downloads/2.0final/
http://dist.repoze.org/zope2/dev/
http://dist.plone.org/release/3.3rc2/

In order to install from on of these you do for example:

easy_install -f http://pylonshq.com/download/0.9.7 Pylons

and that's it. Some projects package up the multiple steps (including
installing setuptools) into a little helper script.

As you might notice all that is required is a known URL and Apache
serving a bunch of files directly.

Hanno