[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3.0, and why I won't use it

[Jim Fulton]

Tim Peters wrote:
> [Max M]
> 
>>>>Where you on Windows or Linux?
> 
> 
> [Steve Holden]

Steve and other blast us for our windows release.

>>>Windows.
> 
> 
> [Max]
> 
>>I thought so :-)
>>
>>I'm on Windows too, and Z3 the installer seems to be in a pretty sorrow
>>state there.
> 
> 
> The Z3 Windows installer is exactly what you get if you:
> 
> 1. Unpack the Linux Z3 tarball.
> 2. Run "install.py bdist_wininst" from its root, on a Windows box
>    with MSVC 6.0 installed.
> 3. Rename the installer that step generates to remove the blank
>    from its name.
> 
> IOW, it's a 100% vanilla distutils-based installer, by way of Zope's
> zpkg, and should be equivalent to what gets created on Linux.  If it's
> not, that's a bug in distutils, or in zpkg, or in X3's zpkg config
> files.
> 
> 
>>I think it is pretty simple to get it running. But stuff like scripts
>>being called "mkzopeinstane" instead of "mkzopeinstane.py"
> 
> 
> That's a religious battle in distutils-land.  At least half of
> Linux-heads seem to think it's offensive to God to leave an extension
> on an "executable" script, and since most contributors to open
> software are Linux-heads, .py gets stripped on most such files. 
> There's no solution to this short of changing distutils to grow
> platform-specific rules about retaining or stripping extensions.

Or making different windows-specific distributions.

> 
>>and there being references to folders that don't exists in the Windows
>>install, so you need to guess which ones to use instead.
> 
> 
> That's news to me.  The entire X3 test suite (both unit and functional
> tests) passes on Windows, when run from a Zope instance created from
> what the installer installs, and that accesses virtually every part of
> X3.
> 
> If you have more details about that, the zope3-dev list would be a
> better place to reveal them.

Indeed.

But we obviously need to either:

- Put more emphasis on the fact that Zope 3 is not an end-user application
   at this point, and/or

- Make the installer much more usable on Windows.  We are going to need
   help from Windows-based Zope 3 developers to make this happen.

Jim


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