[Zope] Distro Views from a relative Newbie

[Chris Keyes]

Hi all

Just figured I should add my views to the discussion about distrobutions and
stuff

I've used SuSE, RedHat, Debian and we also have Mandrake installs here at
NIP... And from what I can tell its more of a matter of personal taste
rather than specific reasions to use one or the other. Some tend to install
a lot and aim to give you everything working, others install less and let
you add what you need, but then, you can always customise what you need when
your up and running...

I've had some problems on Debian with Zope 2.1 and Zope 2.1.1 where the
expat parser is not installed by default (although it seems to be on Windoze
and RedHat)... From my discussions here it would seem that I needed to
install some Debian packages to get it to work, but in the end the PyXML
product sorted that...

Generally we use the source installs of both Python and Zope... And they are
pretty painless.

Installing python2.1 as the default on a machine has caused issues where
none zope related scripts and so on ending up broken... but doing a make
altinstall when installing python and then linking python2.1 to python2.1
just means that new versions of python need a slightly modified start script
pointing to python2.1 and when you compile stuff you need to remember which
python you need to use (Zope helpfully tells you if you try and run 2.4 with
an old version of python)...

In terms of reliability and longterm pain free administration, particularly
if your not the only one using the box you really need to sort out where
things are to be installed and make sure that people stick to these! Also I
believe having used them, that an instance home scheme is well worth the
little bit of pain to get it up and running (remember to change the name of
pythonhome to something else for 2.4 versions of zope - had me confused that
one... :-))

Um, really I think the linux distrobution is not as relevant as how it is
administered. Infact in may ways some of the basic text only installs may be
more appropriate than the modern slick installers that are designed to get
you up and running fast... In the end if it works :-) The other note I
suppose is the regional thing, RedHat seems to have a hold in the USA and is
fairly popular elsewhere... SuSE seems to be much more popular in Germany
and so on...

So I'm going to second Andrew Milton and say install what your most likely
to get support with, if your mates run it then it only costs a pint (or
whatever) to get it fixed!!

Hope thats not all been said in the time it took me to write it...

ChrisK