[Zope3-dev] Re: [Zope-dev] Re: Two visions

[Jeff Shell]

On 3/3/06, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:
> On Mar 3, 2006, at 3:08 AM, Max M wrote:
> > Splitting up Zope to let people use seperate pieces of Zope aka Zed
> > is not a valid reason. Good software practise is a valid reason.
> > But catering for those few developers that wants to use just a few
> > pieces is probably not worth the effort.
>
> Here's one of the reasons I want good packaging:  I'd like to
> continue using Zope-the-technology even if the Zope-the-brand loses
> all recognition.   Whether in the future I'm working on
> DjangoRailsGears 3.0 or Zope3006 or Plone-NG, I'd like to be able to
> carry the various bits of technology that make up Zope around with me
> reasonably easily and run it under different Python platforms.  I say
> this with my cynical and Zope-bigoted "consultant" hat on.  There.  I
> said it. ;-)

Today I tried installing Ruby on Rails 1.0 and TurboGears 0.9a1. And
now I'm really with you on the good packaging bit.

$ gem install rails --include-dependencies
$ easy_install -f
http://www.turbogears.org/preview/download/index.html TurboGears

Although, I also really like Zope's configure/make/make install
process and the fact that I don't need to set up no stinkin' mysql
server to use Zope.

But as I watched TurboGears install and saw all of the pieces it's
pulling in, I have to admit that it was really impressive. That page
in the link above is intimidating to look at - there's just a lot of
links to lots of different packages with version numbers like 0.5.0a1.
But the easy_install thing worked. I've been avoiding Eggs and the
like for a while now (The name 'eggs' bugs me for some unknown reason,
and I'm petty enough to avoid something just for that reason). Seeing
them in action was impressive.

One of the impressive things: having/extracting PyProtocols and
RuleDispatch out of PEAK has made those things widely used. PEAK has
some interesting ideas in it, but it's big and scary to me, and I'm
sure it is to others as well. PEAK has some web stuff in it, from what
I can tell, so in some ways TurboGears is a competitor to the full
PEAK package. But since PyProtocols and RuleDispatch are available
separately, TurboGears can include them and use them.

And maybe that's a good argument for renaming some of the core stuff.
I just think 'Z' and 'Zed' are terrible names. But it's a good
argument for packaging, especially fine-packaging of the core tools.
>From those core tools, lets build and let others build wild and crazy
applications, app servers, and even competition.

One of my thoughts for some weekend hacking was to look at zope.bobo,
or play with my own concept just to see if I really understand how the
publisher/publication interact. As I started thinking about that, I
started wondering (a) how to get the pieces I needed and only the
pieces I needed, (b) how/where to install them while I was developing,
and (c) how to package them up if I was able to come up with anything
successful.

--
Jeff Shell