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

[Jim Fulton]

Fred Drake wrote:
> 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.

It requires tools that we don't have.  In the case of Unix, it
actually runs against the grain of software installers, which
expect to install *one* version of software. I think this is a
lot of complexity.

> 
>>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.

I question whether developers are well served by an installer.
Forget Windows for a moment. I don't think they are well served
by RPM if they need to develop against multiple versions of Zope
at a time.

...

> 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. 

except:

 > 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).

This is non-trivial.  Before this happens we'll have to convince
the docutils sig that it's a good idea. *That* may be even harder
than the technical change.

Given how much work we put into this and how far short we ended
up, it seems strange to talk about these issues as if they were
minor.

Jim

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