[Zope3-dev] Re: AW: Re: AW: relying on win32api in windows supportofzc.zope3recipes

[Martijn Faassen]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Friday 17 August 2007 17:32, Gary Poster wrote:
>> However, it's worth noting to clarify this discussion that buildout  
>> is being successfully used to install a wide variety of software on  
>> *nix systems (I know of Red Hat, Ubuntu, and OS X). This includes  
>> software that does not have eggs (such as M2Crypto)  and software  
>> that does not have much to do directly with Python (such as libxml2  
>> and swig).
> 
> Windows is pretty different in this respect. You really want to use an 
> installer, which means you get a wizard. People in Windows expect this 
> behavior and want it. It is quiet ignorant to ask them to use eggs instead.

Ignorant? Eggs have the binary versions for a reason, and one of the 
main reasons is actually Windows deployment.

It would be nice if one could install Zope 3-based *applications* using 
a Windows installer. But to ask developers to install all the *library* 
dependencies separately using click-through wizards is rather strange. 
It's not like Windows users *enjoy*, say, when installing their hardware 
drivers, to click through literally 12 installers, many of them quite 
different, as I recently had to do on a computer.

People in windows want installers for applications. We're not talking 
about installing a normal application, however. We're talking about 
installing a buildout, typically as a Python developer. We're talking 
about installing library dependencies.

As to installing Python libraries, eggs and buildout now allow us to run 
the exact same buildout.cfg and make it work on Windows and *nix both. 
This is a valuable feature!

You really have to separate the audiences here. When talking about 
buildout on windows, we're talking about developers or advanced users. 
They check these things out from SVN. When you mention automatic 
installers, that makes more sense for end-users. I can imagine a 
graphical tool to set up buildouts for developers on Windows, but I 
imagine that's more the task of some IDE than of an installer.

Regards,

Martijn