[Zope] Deploying with buildout

[Chris McDonough]

On Aug 28, 2007, at 5:55 PM, Ross Patterson wrote:
>
>> Putting these packages in your Zope instance home's "lib/python"
>> directory should get them found before the others.  For Products, you
>> can use an additional "products-path" directive in zope.conf and put
>> files in there.  I don't know how to tell buildout to do either,
>> though.
>
> But wouldn't that cause problems in this case since zope.app.interface
> is a package in two nested-namespace packages.  IOW, wouldn't putting
> zope/app/interface in $INSTANCE_HOME/lib/python mean that it was the
> only package in the zope or zope.app namespace packages?

Gah.  Yeah.  Sorry.  You might get away with creating and installing  
a custom zope.app.interface-myversion.egg into your Python's site- 
packages dir and using something like:

from pkg_resources import require
require('zope.app.interface = myversion')

... in a script early on or do the equivalent within a .pth file in  
your site-packages dir.  Even after that, you *might* need to munge  
the PYTHONPATH, though, to prevent Zope from finding the one in  
SOFTWARE_HOME first. :-(

I find Ian Bicking's virtual_python.py script very useful for trying  
things like this out.  I usually install both a custom version of  
Python and one or more virtual pythons in my automated scripts (using  
the --no-site-packages flag to virtual_python.py).  This means I can  
let distutils/setuptools packages install to site-packages "normally"  
without polluting the main Python installation's site-packages and so  
I don't need to go through gyrations to munge the PYTHONPATH for them  
to be found somewhere else.  I think buildout tends to prefer  
creating scripts that munge the path.

- C