[Zope] which operating system quandry

[David Bear]

I know it has been asked many times which os is best for zope, I have
yet to see a 'system administration perspective' in the discussion. By
this I mean which os seems to have the most worry free administration
of a zope instances. I have installed zope on both FreeBSD and various
linucies and here is what I have observed:

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,
I have yet to use portupgrade to apply security patches to zope
instances running on freebsd. Does anyone know of using cvsupdate for
getting security patches works over the ports collection of zope
smoothly?

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

3) I have never run zope on windows except for test versions of
plone that were loaded through binary installers -- completely 
packaged with python and zope. While this is convenient, I don't
know if I want to run a windows server for any publicly accessible site. 

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??)


-- 
David Bear
phone: 	602-496-0424
fax: 	602-496-0955
College of Public Programs/ASU
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 "Beware the IP portfolio, everyone will be suspect of trespassing"