[Zope-dev] Zope 2.13 - next steps

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 10:45 PM, Jonas Meurer <jonas at freesources.org> wrote:
> another build system would be magnificent :-)
>
> the new build system in zope2.12 makes it hard/impossible to distribute
> zope2 binaries within linux/*bsd/hurd/... distributions. so far no
> distribution i know contains zope2.12, and the most obvious reason is
> the new build system.

In the Zope community we have decided to stop maintaining our own
build infrastructure, as we simply do not have the resources to do so.
Getting this right in a cross platform manner including Windows is no
small task and there's no general open-source build infrastructure
that provides this. Therefor we have decided to go with a language
specific build infrastructure in the form of distutils and its
extension setuptools / distribute.

Personally I think this has been the right choice for us and has
triggered a new interest in distutils. distutils2 is the latest
offspring of that effort and is making good progress. Better
integration into operating system package managers is one of the main
focus areas of that effort. While solving these issues on the Python
language level takes more time, it ultimately is the better approach.

> thus i suggest to either provide monolithic tarballs which do contain
> the debendencies, or change release policy for the dependencies to not
> break backwards compability with every minor release.

I consider packaging up individual Python distributions as individual
system packages as a flawed approach. The specific dependencies on
exact versions of these distributions for any given application are
too diverse for this approach to make much sense. The number of
releases is so frequent and the stability requirements so different
from system packages, that this just isn't a good match.

If I were to package anything as a system package, then it would be
one big package for something like CMFDefault, Plone or Zenoss as an
application or one package for a custom developed application.
zc.sourcerelease is one approach to help in this task for a
zc.buildout based application.

Hanno