[Zope3-Users] Re: buildout and egg depedencies

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi Jeff,

>> In general, once you understand that recipes are just eggs, loaded with
>> an entry point, and that options are passed around in dicts-of-dicts, I
>> find buildout pretty easy to get to grips with.
> 
> I understand that they're eggs with entry points. But that doesn't
> help me figure out all of the options available. It's hard to get a
> simple straightforward list of a Recipe's configuration options, how
> to format them (since the ConfigParser format is so godawful), etc.

Well, of course there's no substitute for decent documentation! :-)

Buildout itself is pretty well documented, IMHO - I use 
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.buildout/1.0.0b31 and ./bin/buildout 
--help as references.

The plone.recipe.* recipes also attempt to document their options 
clearly, for example 
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plone.recipe.zope2instance/1.0

and then we have high level documentation in places like 
http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/buildout.

Of course, some of that's Zope 2 and Plone specific, but at least it's 
not an intractable problem. :)

> I've looked at zopeproject. The biggest problem is that we have large,
> existing applications that don't fit those molds. Starting up a
> totally fresh project? Relatively easy.

Yes, of course - legacy's always hard. :)

> But just today, I was trying to get a running buildout instance thingy
> going for a customer who has a very small site which we haven't yet
> deployed. Now I'm just running into problems with finding out which
> things are configured (in ZCML) by default and which aren't. And the
> last stumbling block I hit before I gave up for the day involved
> `zope.filerepresentation` installing as a zipped egg, which then gets
> in the way of ZCML being able to load its configure.zcml file. I tried
> to find out if there was an 'always_unzip' option for Buildout, but it
> seems to only be a part of buildout's easy_install API.

Unfortunately, that's a setuptools problem. Maybe zc.buildout could have 
that option - it'd be nice. Zipped eggs are a PITA when it comes to 
ZCML. :-(

Btw, this means that no-one's ever used zope.filerepresentation except 
in develop mode, which is pretty crap. :)

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book