[Zope3-Users] Zope eggification - impressions

[Hermann Himmelbauer]

Am Mittwoch, 6. Februar 2008 18:24 schrieb Baiju M:
> In fact, I started an effort to document this, but I want more help
> from this group.  I had announced two book projects to this list earlier.
> The first one was a failure [1], but the second one I succeded with
> help from you all [2].  I am going to re-start the first effort
> again, I hope this time it will be a success :)
>
> The new book, "Web Application Development Using Python and
> Zope Components" will be available from here:
> http://wadupaz.muthukadan.net/

Thanks for the link and your effort, this is somehow helpful. However, I have 
the following suggestions (regarding the buildout part):

1) Like so often in the Zope world, I miss the "big picture" - I (or better, 
the newbies) don't really know what's happening here. What exactly is 
buildout? What's an Egg/setuptools/PyPi? (references would also help here). 
I'd very much appreciate illustrations, something like simple block diagrams 
that show, for example, how buildout pulls together needed modules.

2) Much content is in a recipe-like fashion, for instance on page 4 you 
specify in install_requires "zope.app.zcmlfiles, zope.app.twisted and 
zope.app.securitypolicy". Why do you use exactly these modules? Are they the 
very minimum for Zope3? What about other modules, e.g. formlib? Is there some 
overview for available modules?

3) Page 5 and 6 is not understandable for newcomers - they can simply cut & 
paste the code but they will never know what happens here as they lack the 
knowledge of e.g. what a ZopeSecurityPolicy is, how the ZopeDB works etc. I, 
too, don't really know where my instance data will be situated (var/, log/, 
site-packages/ etc/). I think things would be a lot easier if the user can 
call some "mkzopeinstance" script as in the tarballs that does this stuff for 
him.

4) When using eggs, packages are normally kept in an ".egg" file, therefore I 
can't have a look at the Zope3 source code - which is inevitable for Zope3 
development. AFAIK, there's some option that lets easy_install decompress the 
eggs and install it in plain text, is this also the case in your book?

5) The book gives me the overall impression that installing Zope3 the 
egg-style way requires me to do quite some really complicated stuff I even 
don't really understand in full depth. Compared to that, installing Zope3 
from the tarball is a lot easier - it's basically about "./configure, make 
install, mkzopeinstance", which is not complicated at all.

Best Regards,
Hermann.

-- 
hermann at qwer.tk
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