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

[Jim Fulton]

Max M wrote:
> Lennart Regebro wrote:
> 
>> Max M wrote:
> 
> 
>> I have a vague recollection of the Zope2.7 install making a start-menu 
>> link to teh script that makes new instances. That could be very 
>> helpful, maybe?
> 
> 
> That was the first place I looked actually.
> 
>> I haven't looked much at it myself, I just had the same problems 
>> understanding what happened, and simply ended up checking out HEAD 
>> with svn and compiling it that way. It was easier. ;)
> 
> 
> I wonder if there is a reason that it ends up in site-packages instead 
> of in its own seperate directory?

Because we want to use distutils.  It *absolutely sucks* writing windows
installers.  I'd really rather that Zope Corp not be in that business.

If someone outside ZC was willing to work on a better Zope 3 installer,
*and* maintain it for the long haul, then this would not be an issue.

> It certainly make upgrading to newer versions of Z3 more difficult. The 
> main reason for Zope 2.7 was to make it easier to seperate different 
> versions of Zope, Python, product collections (like cmf) etc.

Yes, although it's not clear to me how important this is for Windows.
In our experience, it really isn't that important even for Unix.
That is, in practice, it's rare that we run multiple sites on
the same machine.

Definatly, in theory, having multiple versions of Zope or
products is good, although in practice, people don't really
expect multiple versions and providing multiple versions adds
lots of complexity.

Consider RPMs.  RPMs really don't support installing multiple
versions well. I think that this is because they are servicen the
90% case that people only want one version on a system.

Of course, developers have different equirements.  I, as a developer,
usually have many versions of Python and Zope installed on my system,
but I don't use RPM to install them.

Perhaps we should have 2 kinds of Windows binary releases:

- A developers release that is just a zip file that contains
   pyds, and

- A non-developer release that works like the current installer, but
   with easier access to documentation and applications for setting
   up instances.

Perhaps we should only distribute a developer's releases until we have
a decent installer and a better end-user story.

In any case, if folks want an installer that doesn't install into
Python, they need to either:

- Sign up to develop and maintain a customer installer,
   which need not necessarily be Zoep specific,

   or

- Get involved in the Python distutils sig and help lobby for
   and create an enhancement to distutils to support installing
   applications outside of Python.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton           mailto:jim at zope.com       Python Powered!
CTO                  (540) 361-1714            http://www.python.org
Zope Corporation     http://www.zope.com       http://www.zope.org