[Zope3-dev] December release post-mortem

[Sidnei da Silva]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 07:36:35AM -0500, Jim Fulton wrote:
| And then there are the Windows releases.  Making Zope 2 windows releases
| is very painful and there don't seem to be many people willing to help.
| We've avoided the pain for Zope 3 by being less ambitious.  We let distutils
| do most of the work.  The result is that making a windows release takes 
| minutes
| and is highly automated, but the experience for the end user is less than
| ideal,  Many would rightfully argue that it is inadequate.  What we need
| is a release process that is as easy as the Zope 3 windows release process
| and produces a result as usable as the Zope 2 windows release.  I'm not sure
| exactly what the answer is, but I am sure we need to take a fresh approach.
| Whatever approach we take needs to be highly automated and must not require
| a lot of specialized Windows expertise.

The installers do not require much Windows expertise. In fact, they
require a lot of 'makefile' expertise right now, and some Inno Setup
expertise, not much else.

At Enfold Systems we are using our own home-grown python-based process
to cobble together all the dependencies for building installers. We
haven't switched to Zope 2.9 though.

When the time comes around for a switch, our goal is to switch from
Inno Setup to Wix [1], at which point we hope to contribute this work
to Zope. That might take another 6 months though and sure we don't
want to hold back the Zope Windows installers that long.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/archive/2004/04/05/107709.aspx

-- 
Sidnei da Silva
Enfold Systems, LLC.
http://enfoldsystems.com