[Zope] What causes the community to stall so often?

[Lennart Regebro]

From: "Derek Simkowiak" <dereks@realloc.net>
>  I.e., who knows whether or not that mirror you just downloaded from has a
respectable admin...

1. If you download it from Zope org, theres no mirror involved.
2. What would prevent anybody from making an new install with new checksums?

How come you trust a third-party RPM more than first party source? That just
doesn't make sense.

> I was referring to (a) the updated list of dependencies,

Python (yes, with threads and stuff).

> including what versions of which shared libraries you need installed,

Which is exactly none.

> (b) pristine sources (see above), and (c) the RPM scripts that
automatically
> shutdown/close/halt all necessary components, do the upgrade, then
> restart/open/run the program again.  What happens if you do a "./configure
> ; make ; make install" on a server where you have a running Apache or Zope
> install?

Nothing. Zope keeps running until you restart it.

> -> Making binary distributions of any kind is a huge pain in the ass.
>
> Can you back this up?  Many projects (MySQL?  KDE?) just maintain
> the .spec file and auto-generate the RPMs for many different
> architectures.

If you don't test the RPMs on the platforms you are supposed to support,
then most of the benefits goes out the window, since the new RPM might end
up not being useable, and then you have to install the source anyway...

> 1. I don't want Zope to test them.  The community will do that.

Firstly, the community (ie *you*) can create them too. And secondly, if
there are no RPM's created already, thats probably because it hasn't been a
huge need for them in the community. If nobody wants to *do* RPM's, why do
you think people want to *test* them?

> 3. I'm only asking for one, maybe two more than the Windows one they are
> already doing

Well, I'm not sure which are the biggest formats, but I do know that there
are a lot of different unix version out there, and that they can't all use
the same packages. You want RPMs for Red Hat Linux? What about packages for
FreeBSD and OpenBSD 2.8, 2.9 and 3.0?

There is a reason most unix software is distributed as source: Maintinning
tons of different binary distributions is a pain in the royal ass.