[Zope] External Methods - Weirdness between two installations of Zope

[Ian Sealy]

Dear Edward,

> So we have a "test" and "production" installation of Zope 2.6. I'm
> experiencing some very interesting wierdness with external methods on
> the two systems. Now, I didn't play an integral role to the setup of
> these services, so the answer may be a simple configuration option I'm
> unawares of and my tech people are too ambivalent to care about
>
> Anyway, I've developed a small application on the test environment
> that has many external methods. I would often be editing the scripts
> in a telnet session and then reloading pages to see the new results.
> No problem.
>
> I copy over the product to the production environment - I exported
> over the zope objects and copied the .py file to the other Extensions
> folder - and there are a few small bugs to work out. But on THIS
> instance of zope, changes to the external method are not reflected
> unless I go into the method object in the ZMI and click "save
> changes".
>
> This stikes me as very unusual. Any advice?

It sounds like your development installation is running in debug mode,
but your production one isn't. Which is pretty sensible. The development
Zope will have either been started with the -D option or with the
Z_DEBUG_MODE environment variable set (do a "python z2.py --help" or
read doc/DEBUGGING.txt for more info).

One of the effects of debug mode is that Zope reloads external methods
automatically if they've changed on the filesystem. For other effects,
see:

	http://www.zope.org/Members/klm/debuggingzope

Cheers,
Ian

--
Dr Ian Sealy
Internet Development
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol