[Zope3-dev] Building standalone ZPT from Zope 3 using zpkgtools

[Shane Hathaway]

Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Jim Fulton wrote:
> 
>>Thanks for the positive feedback. Fred Drake worked very hard
>>on this.  One thing we did right was to leverage distutils
>>ability to build binary releases.  I'm also encouraged by work done
>>at the recent PyCon sprints that someday we'll even have a packaging
>>system, for Python that will allow us to make installation of packages
>>much easier too.
> 
> 
> FWIW, my original reason for trying Gentoo Linux was to evaluate its
> packaging system, Portage, which is written in Python.  I intended to
> grab ideas and incorporate them into a new packaging system, but Portage
> turned out to be so good that I switched to Gentoo and stopped designing
> my own system.  Portage also leverages distutils and can produce/consume
> binary packages.
> 
> Have you thought about porting Portage, or something like it, for use as
> a general Python package management system?

BTW, I'll give you an escape hatch. ;-)  Portage is licensed under the
GPL, which probably excludes it from the Python standard library.

I'm sure Fred is doing excellent work, but I'm having trouble seeing why
we need zpkgtools.  Is it not sufficient to just "python setup.py
install" all of Zope 3?  I've been doing that with Zope 3 Subversion
checkouts and Twisted, even though I actually use less than 10% of the
code installed.  In fact, my co-workers are about to put such a system
into production.  The unused code causes no problems that I've detected.

Shane