[Zope-dev] Zope 2.12: mkzopeinstance, runzope and zopectl - a small proposal

[Chris Withers]

yuppie wrote:
> Currently buildout is just used to set up the software. 

Wrong. The buildout I posted, which uses no fancy recipes, sets up an 
instance. The egg cache, as such, is "the software"...

> is used to set up instances. And while I see that using buildout for 
> setting up everything in one step has some advantages, it's not the best 
> pattern for all use cases.

So tell us where it's not best rather than just asserting that such a 
use case exists ;-)

> mkzopeinstance helps to draw a line between software and data. 

No it doesn't. Plenty of software can live in an instance.
IMNSHO, buildout does a *better* job of drawing a line between software 
and data...

> that's important for distributors who want to distribute generic 
> software, not user specific instance setups. 

Distributors just want a tarball or similar, let them use 
zc.sourcerelease and have a slightly different buildout.cfg, or even 
default.cfg, which uses that tarball as the source of eggs rather than 
PyPI...

> And sometimes it is useful 
> to link an existing instance to a new buildout by updating some paths in 
> instance/bin. 

I don't understand this. Please explain more...

> Or to create several instances based on one buildout.

Why?

>> Interesting. I never noticed that... Hopefully that change will make it 
>> into Zope 2.12 final?
> 
> Yes. I made that change on the 2.12 branch as well.

Cool :-)

>> Cool. If only the zope2 egg could expose these now, it would make the 
>> buildout.cfg simpler... just the matter of passing in the config. I 
>> wonder if anyone can think of a nicer way of doing that?
> 
> runzope and zopectl are defined as entry points:
> http://svn.zope.org/Zope/tags/2.12.0b4/setup.py?rev=102515&view=auto
> 
> Or did you mean something else?

I meant I nicer way of passing in the location of zope.conf...

>>> we can make it unnecessary to specify the interpreter. 
>> When runzope and zopectl are built by buildout, this is already the 
>> case... One python is used for both...
> 
> No. Currently you also need 'zopepy' (or 'py' in your case). 

They're all the same python...

>>> 4.) How do you create zopeservice.py for Windows?
>> What's Windows? Seriously though, I haven't needed to run Zope 2.12 on 
>> Windows, so I don't know...
> 
> But we have to support Windows. And I was able to get zopeservice.py 
> running with mkzopeinstance. *If* we decide to use buildout the way you 
> propose, someone has to figure out how to create zopeservice.py without 
> mkzopeinstance.

Sure, I can't imagine it's a particularly hard problem, it's just not 
one the I'm interested in solving...

Chris

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