whit wrote:
Not everybody likes the activate dance. With buildout, you don't need
it. The recipes make sure that the scripts that get installed into the
buildout's 'bin' directory have the right PYTHONPATH set and have
access to the eggs you requested for the buildout.
is there really a difference between zopectl and source bin/activate? I
guess the main difference here is where PYTHONPATH gets set and how
people work with it. for example, if you just start python and want to
play with code.... sounds like with zc.buildout you are out of luck for
things installed in the buildout.
In our situation, we might have multiple versions of software running on
different processes started in different workingenv (often not even
using zope). being able to contextualize the python path is a useful
development tool; this is understandable for buildout to avoid(as a
deployment tool), but if we are considering using buildout as a
prescribed way for people to manage their development environments, it
seems lacking.
I think this is the basic difference -- workingenv is
development-centric, while buildout is deployment-centric. This does
not necessarily mean "the best tool for the job", because focusing on
development and ignore deployment isn't a good job, nor the other way
around.
At TOPP we know how to address both stories with workingenv. We haven't
figured it out with buildout, despite trying. And we definitely aren't
satisfied with just a deployment tool that doesn't address our
development needs.
But there's a lot of use cases for Plone specifically where carefully
developing just a deployment solution makes sense. That doesn't make
sense for us, because we're not in the kind of consulting business where
the relative scale of development and deployment works like that. But
eh; the presence of a buildout for Plone doesn't hurt our position any.
Anything that gets rid of another ad hoc crappy deployment is good by
me. And if other people are working on it, all the better! If *Plone*
becomes incompatible with workingenv that'd be bothersome (though it was
not compatible with workingenv without some work in the first place).
But if a buildout is incompatible, eh... who knows, it might even make
sense to create something like a "freeze this workingenv as a buildout"
script. That one directory structure can't be both at the same time
isn't a huge problem in my mind.
I'm not too fond of zc.buildout's directory scheme eiher. In
particular, I wish that it would use 'lib/python' instead of 'eggs'
and 'src' instead of 'develop-eggs'. I don't know enough zc.buildout
details to be able to say whether that can be chagned by
remimplementing the egg installation recipe. I would sure hope it is.
+1
this may be all that is required to make the two play well together(or
have buildout respect an existing workingenv when doing it's local
install of eggs). Maybe it's just a matter of zc.buildout seeing
workingenv is in effect and not composing special pythonpaths.
harmony is my interest here. workingenv is pretty low-level and works
hard to work well with python. there is no reason that zc.buildout
should have a problem with that.. it just needs to do less when
appropriate.
Path names aren't really the problem. We got a little guerrilla war
going on over the setuptools' script-generating monkey patches. We'd
both probably prefer a proper way to change how setuptools generates
scripts, but it's not clear that we could really be compatible --
enumeration vs. changing the path is a totally different strategy. I'd
rather see easy-install.pth become a better package database, or some
other strategy of external requirement specifications, instead of
building it into scripts. I understand the issue Jim is trying to solve
here, but putting everything into the buildout.cfg and then imperatively
setting up the files from there bothers me and does not make development
easy IMHO.
That's mostly the problem. Then workingenv would do its part by
monkeypatching distutils and setuptools to install things locally, and
changing site.py to not automatically pick up things globally. And
buildout could do its stuff that applies to other more complicated
setups than just setting up some libraries, which is about where
workingenv stops.
Well, what I'd *really* like is an idea of a working environment that
applies more widely than Python, because other languages (including but
not limited to the dynamic languages) have all these same problems, and
we all have half-assed solutions. But I don't even know how to start
that conversation. And don't get me started on how the distributions
are going to look at all this!
Ian
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