[Zope] Production Advice

[Jens Vagelpohl]

There are various problems with using a Zope setup that is included 
with a Linux distribution:

- They are almost always outdated

- They employ their own policies as far as software layout is concerned 
that might conflict or at least have nothing in common anymore with a 
standard from-source install. This can become problematic when you need 
to try and stitch a package in that is not also pre-built for that 
specific setup.

- As the never-ending questions about "I installed Zope RPM from XYZ 
and now I cannot log in" it seems that these RPM setups, since they 
can't insert the step to create the admin user during install like the 
source version can, make it harder for  inexperienced Zope users

- On the mailing lists users of such built-in packages are much more 
likely to be greeted with silence or told to upgrade or install from 
source if they encounter problems. No one wants to debug problems 
potentially caused by packaging, and few people want to help with 
outdated packages.

IMHO what it amounts to is that it's *not* easier to use preconfigured 
and pre-built packages. It is potentially way more frustrating.

jens


> On Sat, 2004-07-03 at 14:25, robert rottermann wrote:
>> Jerome R. Westrick wrote:
>>> SuSE is reknown for delivering over 2000 programs preconfigured.
>>> It does not constantly update theese to the latest version.
>>>
>>> So I would expect that you would not have the same version of Zope
>>> delivered via SuSE as the one you downloaded and installed yourself 
>>> on
>>> windows.
>>>
>>> I would:
>>> 1) install Zope from SuSE cd's.
>> NO!
>> Do not do that!
>>
>> Install both Python and and Zope from Source
>>
>> It is dead easy and done in a coupple of minutes.
>>
>> Otherwise you do not know what you have.
>> And you can not use Zope V2.7x great configuration policies.
>>
>> I do run Zope on a couple of Suse boxes (8.1-9.1). First I did Jerry
>> proposes. However installing from the sources is far easier.
>>
>> Robert