[Zope3-Users] buildout and egg depedencies

[Jeff Shell]

On Dec 6, 2007 8:08 AM, Benji York <benji at zope.com> wrote:
> Jim Fulton wrote:
> > None of the above. What is the harm of the dependencies?
>
> One of the options included in "none of the above" is to not use
> buildout at all.  Forget that the project in question uses buildout (or
> setuptools) and integrate it into your project however you would have
> before those tools existed (svn:externals, make a checkout, whatever).

That's such a disappointing answer. It's one that I've gotten a couple
of times when I've said "hey, I'm trying to move to a release based
system using distutils and setuptools and I'm floundering." And I have
made our own system. And it's.... I don't know. I'd like to spend more
time solving customer problems than figuring out how to install our
solutions to customer problems. We're in desperate need of reliable,
repeatable distributions. DESPERATE.

How did it come to be that the Python tools are so bad at this?
Setuptools is horrible when it comes to doing local
(instance-home-ish) installations, requiring virtualenv or whatever.
And I've had little success getting those to work. Maybe they just
break my way of thinking about how Python does and should work.
Whatever. Buildout looks like it tries to address many of those
issues, but again I find myself fighting against my natural instincts.
Where's some end user documentation? The doc-test is difficult to read
and speaks in generics, not about day-to-day problems. The Recipes are
even worse, leaving one to clamor through the web to get back to the
cheeseshop page and then face the same difficult to read doc-test kind
of 'help'. Which I wouldn't mind reading, if I could easily read that
help locally, like a man page or using Python's 'help()' system.
``buildout help zc.recipe.egg``, ``buildout help zc.recipe.cmmi``,
whatever.

That I'm still frustrated by these tools all this time later is
disappointing. And yes, it's easier to write your own. That's the
Python way. Don't understand [zope, pylons, cherrypy, quixote,
skunkweb]? Write your own web framework! Python does make it easy to
do that because it's such a fantastic language. But I think that
attitude, in turn, gives us worse tools, because everyone scratches
their own itch and moves on, leaving everything incomplete. It seems
almost like it's easier to write your own tool than to read whatever
cryptic documentation exists for another.

I've gotten Buildout to work on some small components. It's great -
check out the source, run buildout, wait, wait, wait, and then have a
nice little self contained testing and development environment. But
I've never been able to get a full Zope 3 "Application" up and running
in that environment.

There's just no time and the tools are just too hard to learn under
the circumstances my little company is operating in right now.
Buildout *seems* like it could fix some big problems that have been
hitting us hard in recent weeks. But I still can't wrap my head around
how.

-- 
Jeff Shell