[Zope3-dev] Re: More thoughts on packaging

[Tres Seaver]

Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Jim Fulton wrote:
> 
>>There seems to be a possible consensus emerging that we should
>>use a packaging system.  I suggest that we should use an existing
>>system (or systems) such as RPM or the debian system and
>>provide the ability to generate course-grained distributions
>>from these systems for those systems (e.g. windows) that either
>>don't have package systems or don't have package systems that
>>we support.
> 
> 
> Why not Python distutils and go from there? There are ways to create
> RPMs from these, and I imagine .debs as well (I use Debian but haven't
> tried yet).

I am not very happy with a couple of things about the RPM generation 
done by distutils (see my other post about the assumptions made by 
distutils).  At a minimum, we will need to extend disttils in a couple 
of places:

   - Move the metadata *out* of the setup.py file (in fact, most packages
     should *not* require an explicit setup.py file at all!);

   - Make it trivial to include "data" (e.g., page template files,
     images, ZCML, documentation) along with code (distutils is
     pathetic in its handling of "data");

   - Capture dependency information.

Note that if all this data is available in some declarative format, 
generating a .spec file (or whatever Debian's analog is called) will be 
a mechanical process for 99% of the things we need to pacakge.

If we can manage such extensions over distutils, that would be great; 
we should then nominate them for inclusion at the language level.  If we 
can't, then that is also OK;  we should be prepared to move forward 
either way.

Tres.
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
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