Jim Fulton wrote: > Some recent discussions on the distutils-sig mailing list have > helped me to understand some issues related to the ways we > extend the Zope application server. Traditionally, in Zope 2, > you extended Zope by "dropping" product packages into a special > "Products" package. This was very convenient in many ways, but > doesn't always provide enough control or visibiity to what's > going on. > > In Zope 3, we went with a more explicit installation mechanism, > in which people had to explicitly cause a package's ZCML files to be > loaded for it to be used. We added a mechanism to make this easier, > by simply dropping a file into a special directory, package-includes, > so an installer wouldn't have to fool with pointy brackets. > > I've noticed that at Zope Corporation, for our customer projects, > we tend not to use package-includes. We prefer to explicitly include > packages we use directly oin our application ZCML files. (As > applications, may be composed of several layers, we may include > things at multiple levels.) > > In thinking about this, I realized that there are two different users > here with different concerns: > > - Application developers need to build an application. They will > generally want fairly tight control over what goes into the > application. For them, it's valuable to say in an explicit > way what they want. > > - If the application is extensible, then application users > will want to be able to extend the application by adding > "pluggins". If application users are not technically > sophisticated, or, more importantly, not technically interested, > they peobably would prefer to just drop something into a special > directory and be done with it. > > In summary, I think we need *both* approaches, as they serve different > needs.
I agree with all of the above, but fail to see what your implication is. I think we have all that now. Sure, we're not dropping Zope 3 plug-ins into a special directory but really anywhere in PYTHONPATH. Whether that additional freedom makes it easier is debatable, but I'd say we're still burned from Zope 2 wrt fixed drop-in locations. Frankly, I think something like "ez_install zope.reallycoolstuff" is even easier than manually dropping stuff. As for the package-includes slug, a simple ez_install-like tool could help there as well. I sketched it out once on a blog post: http://www.z3lab.org/sections/blogs/philipp-weitershausen/2006_01_11_mata-los-productos Philipp _______________________________________________ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com