[Zope] Re: which operating system quandry

[Maik Ihde]

David Bear <David.Bear at ...> writes:

> 1) Freebsd ports collection is an easy way to install zope -- the
> ports maintainer takes care of making the build files to handle all the
> zope dependencies including python versions, libraries, etc. However,

Actually I must say that I tried the Zope 2.8 Port a while ago and this was
incorrectly trying to use the wrong Python Version 2.4.x. I mailed the
maintainer and he wrote that he would fix it. Looking at
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=zope&stype=all I can see that the
Zope 2.8.8 Port still references to Python 2.4 - so it got updated but it is
still using the *wrong* Python version. :(

And I would not dare to update my Zope using the FreeBSD Port System, since I
had some bad experiences with this regarding other Applications. But that
strongly depends on the quality of the Port itself.

> 2) I've run zope on Red Hat and Suse linux. In both cases I found that
> I needed to install a different version of python than the one
> packaged with the distro becuase Zope had specific dependencies for
> new versions python. Applying patches to zope is manual. It has always been 

Quite funny, because RedHat and Suse do exactly the same as I have noticed with
FreeBSD. So how come, that you had a different experience. Which Zope and Python
Versions did you install?

Zope Packages in Debian and Ubuntu do work nicely although I would also
recommend to at least install Zope from source. 

> inconvenient to build python and PIL in a separate run instances for
> zope. This seems like a major pain in the ...

However this approach gives you more flexibility, since you can update Python
and Zope at the moment that *you* want to and you can ensure that Security
Updates do not break something in your Zope instance (which however has never
happened to me, but you never know...).

> 4) I am very interested to know how others manage zope sites. Are
> there any best practices? Are there any linux distributions that are
> more kind to zope than others -- meaning they don't have dependencies
> on old python versions, or they have a very good patch system (debian
> apt updates for zope??)

Debian and Ubuntu, as I mentioned before, play quite well with Zope. Much better
than FreeBSD from my experience, but as always ymmv. ;)

Regards
Maik