[Zope] Re: Zope binary distributions

[Matthew T. Kromer]

Erik Stephens wrote:

>
>
>Is it my fault that Zope people are overly sensitive right now?  Am I
>spreading misinformation?  I thought I was just asking questions.  I
>didn't know that was such a crime.
>
>-Erik
>

For my part, I don't think we're overly sensitive.  What we do though is 
try to fit "lowest common denominator" when we do releases.  In fact, 
our binary distributions of Zope for linux include a Python that is 
linked against a very old glibc -- it's actually built on a RedHat 5.2 
system for compatibility.  If you try to use that in production, it will 
be *painfully* slow.

For example, being the speed freak that I am, I build a custom python 
2.1.2 for my own use using gcc 3.1 (thats right, bleeding edge from CVS) 
because it can make me a python that's about 14-18% faster without me 
having to go license the Intel C compiler.  You do have to throw more 
options at gcc and massage it though, so that build represents a large 
portion of risk.  What we want to do is lower risk, and that usually 
means distributing things in a fairly plain fashion and leave people to 
build better solutions for themselves.

However, we can easily cause things to spin out of control when we offer 
advice or suggestions based on partial data or hearsay.  Sometimes this 
is useful -- but sometimes that rather conditional advice gets picked up 
as gospel and used out of context.

Here's another request we get a lot:  distribute a python with large 
file support enabled.  We'd love to do this -- but that means having to 
either have some kind of unified installer which can auto-sense if your 
platform can support it, or permuting our builds so that we now have 2 
times as many combinations as before.  Our position is that we want to 
provide people with a single choice that works as reasonably as we can 
make it in all circumstances.  You as an end user still have the 
opportunity to package your own solution -- that's why we're open source.  

-- 
Matt Kromer
Zope Corporation  http://www.zope.com/