[Zope3-dev] More thoughts on packaging

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 10:04, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 09:28 AM 2/17/04 -0500, Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> >I'm in the minority, apparently, but I like having a single, top-level
> >setup script for ZODB.  It's a central point of control.  There's only
> >one place to look when a module isn't getting compiled or installed, and
> >there's a single list of all the software that should be installed.
> 
> I agree with the DRY principle.  There should be only one authoritative 
> source for a piece of information.
> 
> However, for larger systems, that principle isn't served by putting 
> everything into one setup.py, any more than we put all our Python code into 
> one big module.  We ought to be able to "import" the metadata from modular 
> setup files.

Indeed, there's a tradeoff between centralized configuration and
repeating the configuration information in more than one place.  If the
configuration is really simple, I don't mind repeating it, but we're
probably headed towards non-simple configuration.

One problem with a source tree is that it's hard to import things from
it.  If the distutils metadata is in some source directory, you need to
tell setup how to find it.  I don't particularly like a scheme that
grovels over whatever directories you tell it and find things, because
you don't have enough explicit control over what goes on.  It's also
hard to decide how to import something once its found.  Is it part of a
package?  Should it's containing directory be on the pythonpath?

Jeremy