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

[Fred Drake]

Max M wrote:
> 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.

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:31:43 -0500, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
> 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.

For production, certainly.  For testing and development, while it
*may* not be that important to run more than one at a time, it is
important to be able to have more than one installation on a system. 
We'd *like* not to require a separate Python installation for each.

> 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.

I don't think it adds a lot, though it does add some.

> 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.

Site and package developers are a primary audience for the installer,
since everyone who's running the installer more than once will be
either a site developor, package developer, or an admin setting up a
server.

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

I think someone's working on a graphical alternative to mkzopeinstance already.

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

We added a feature to the Python 2.4 distutils to allow the --home
installation option on all platforms (not just Unix), which is really
all we need to support multiple installations on a machine.  There's
work needed to create an installer that can use this (perhaps packing
up the "built" version of the software and installing it to a home
specificed in the GUI).


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.    <fdrake at gmail.com>
Zope Corporation