[Grok-dev] Towards Grok 0.14

[Steve Schmechel]

--- On Wed, 9/17/08, Philipp von Weitershausen <philipp at weitershausen.de> wrote:

> From: Philipp von Weitershausen <philipp at weitershausen.de>
> Subject: Re: [Grok-dev] Towards Grok 0.14
> To: "David Bain" <david.bain at alteroo.com>
> Cc: "Grok-dev list" <grok-dev at zope.org>, "Leonardo Rochael Almeida" <leorochael at gmail.com>
> Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2008, 1:38 AM
> David Bain wrote:
> > @Leonardo,
> > I think that would be valuable. I personally know that
> certain 
> > universities have draconian firewall setups that are
> just not friendly 
> > to the pypi way of installing software.
> 
> easy_install and zc.buildout communicate to PyPI using
> regular HTTP. So 
> any firewall that lets you access pypi.python.org from a
> web browser 
> should allow easy_install/zc.buildout just as well.

True.  But the browser often has access to authentication credentials that that Python does not.  You can visit pypi effortlessly with a browser, but zc.buildout fails completely.

Trying to instruct people (windows users) to enter their password into the HTTP_PROXY environment variable seems completely foreign to most.  On some systems you must hash the password a specific way, on others the proxy authentication is so picky it just won't work.

Instructing them how to install and correctly configure NTLM-APS (authenticating proxy server), is a huge stumbling block when you want show a non-Python developer how easy it is to get up and running with Grok.

I have been locked out of my work account twice by attempting a mis-configured download from pypi.  The wrong password was repeatedly offered by buildout until the corporate policy completely locked out my account for 20 minutes.  During that time I could do virtually nothing.

Needless to say, this would impress other developers in completely the wrong way.

A super-simple way to get a stable release and some sample applications, would be a great help in evangelizing Grok.  

If I convince others to do serious development, then the steps needed to make buildout work in our environment can be addressed with our IT department.  (However, university students will probably always have to deal with restrictive proxies.)

Thanks,
Steve