[Zope3-dev] Dependencies and distribution

Adrian van den Dries avdd@flow.com.au
Mon, 26 May 2003 12:17:47 +1000


On May 24, Thomas Guettler wrote:
> > Constructive criticisms and suggestions will certainly help.
> 
> It would be nice if the new Catalog would only depend on ZODB. Then
> you can take ZODB and the new Catalog and write your own frontend:
> e.g. Corba or an other remote procedure call method.

Extending this, I've always wondered why Zope isn't packaged, or why
there are no moves to package, Zope(2|3) as a simple package with
simple dependencies on each of the bits that can be used standalone
(like ZODB, PageTemplates, Catalog, etc.), and zope.org simply
distributes all the bits individually in source form (to aid package
maintainers like Debian's) and only combine them for the binary
builds, and perhaps one "everything" source tarball.  Wouldn't this
appeal to both the only-the-bits-you-need crowd and the
all-in-one-place crowd, between which the Zope community seems equally
divided (although the OSS/FS/filesystem-developers subgroup would
always, I suspect, be biased toward the latter group).  Are there any
insurmountable hurdles in working towards this distribution model?

FWIW I believe the all-in-one-place philosophy is flawed for Zope
anyway, because you almost always need to install extra products to
suit your environment.  Perhaps it's a nice business objective ("Look,
it's all on this CD"), but that is an issue for Zope Corporation, not
the Zope development community, which should concentrate only on the
quality of the modules and packages.

0.0303788 AUD

a.

-- 
 Adrian van den Dries                           avdd@flow.com.au
 Development team                               www.dev.flow.com.au
 FLOW Communications Pty. Ltd.                  www.flow.com.au