[Zope3-dev] ZCML, Paths, and the Things You Actually Want To Change At Configuration Time

[Benji York]

Jeff Shell wrote:
> Is there any good pattern for dealing with this? 

At ZC we use a system called, simply, "the buildout".

(We've nominally open sourced it by placing it in the sandbox 
svn+ssh://svn.zope.org/repos/main/Sandbox/zc/buildout/trunk.  I say 
"nominally" because there wasn't much external interest at the time, and 
haven't updated the sandbox to the current version in a while.)

The buildout handles things like downloading source and binaries, 
compiling, making Zope instances, building config files, writing ctl 
scripts, installing cron jobs, and lots more.  It happens to use 
ConfigParser-style files.  We collect all of the system-level config 
info in those files, and have separate files for "dev", "stage", and 
"prod" environments.

Long story short: It's an interesting problem space, but, as you've 
noticed, ZCML (alone) doesn't apply to this kind of "whole system" 
configuration.
-- 
Benji York
Senior Software Engineer
Zope Corporation