[zope2-tracker] [Bug 673441] [NEW] Poor installation user experience

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Public bug reported:

I think that the installation part of the user experience needs to be
revisited:

<user-story>

A user wants to install Zope2 using buildout...

She goes to http://www.zope.org/, then see the note on the new website,
clicks on the link, goes to http://zope2.zope.org/

She then clicks on the release news item
http://zope2.zope.org/news/zope-2.13.0-released, finds the notes on the
release, but no download or installation information.

She then search the site and finds the "Getting Zope 2" link at the top,
clicks on it and goes to http://zope2.zope.org/releases

She reads the installation instructions, clicks on the link and gets
directed to http://docs.zope.org/zope2/releases/2.12/INSTALL.html

After some research, she finds that the page points to Zope 2.12 and not
2.13, so she goes back and clicks on the docs.zope.org link. This takes
her to a documentation overview, but there no sign of any installation
instructions, so she goes back to the 2.12 installation instructions.

After some more research, she finds a link "Zope Release Information"
and goes to http://docs.zope.org/zope2/releases/index.html

On that page, she finds the Zope 2.13 links to the "Installing and Zope
with zc.buildout" (sic !), clicks on it a finally arrives at the page
http://docs.zope.org/zope2/releases/2.13/INSTALL-buildout.html

She then follows instructions and hits the first bummer:

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/Z/Zope2/Zope2-<Zope
version>.tar.gz

No .tar.gz is available. Looking at
http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/Z/Zope2/ she finds that there's a
ZIP file, so downloads that and unzips it.

Continuing with the instructions she tries to bootstrap the
installation:

/path/to/your/python bootstrap/bootstrap.py

bin/python: can't open file 'bootstrap/bootstrap.py': [Errno 2] No such
file or directory

Looking at the directory, she sees that there's a bootstrap.py in the
root dir of the distribution.

She runs that and then continues with bin/buildout.

This generates a few warnings which she ignores.

To her surprise, buildout then goes on to download a huge number of
package eggs, even though she installed from a ZIP file (which she
expected to already contain copies of all of these).

After getting coffee, she then finally sees the script complete.

She then follows instructions, runs bin/mkzopeinstance, enters instance1
as dir and the admin user details.

Finally, she starts Zope using instance1/bin/zopectl start

.
daemon process started, pid=9760

Hmm, no mention of the site URL. So she looks in instance1/etc/zope.conf
and finds that the standard location hasn't changed in the new release.

Pointing a brower at http://127.0.0.1:8080/ gives her the ZMI as
expected.

</user-story>

There are a couple of things that would greatly improve the user
experience:

 * the release news should include a link to the (correct) installation instructions
 * the download page should point to the installation instructions for each release version (since these differ per version), not only the change logs
 * the installation instructions should be updated to what's actually available on the download server
 * the buildout instructions need to be updated to what's actually in the ZIP archive
 * it would help, if the installation instructions included a hint on how to quickly fire up Zope for a test (it's not obvious that clicking "next" on the page will get you to those instructions and new users won't read the "Creating a buildout-based Zope instance", since they already followed the instructions on "Creating a Zope instance")

** Affects: zope2
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
Poor installation user experience
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/673441
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