[Framework-Team] Re: Plone 3.0 product deployment

[Martin Aspeli]

Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> I realize Plone 3.0 will ship with both packages and old-style products. 
> Recently I wrote a proposal that should alleviate this problem by making 
> it possible to deploy products as eggs [1]. I thought that this would 
> become relevant only for Plone 3.5.
> 
> Now Daniel Nouri made me aware that you can already deploy products as 
> eggs. In fact, you can already deploy products into lib/python, as long 
> as lib/python/Products/__init__.py contains a namspace package 
> declaration (in the setuptools sense, 
> pkg_resources.declare_namespace('Products')). That means that Plone 3.0 
> can at least ship as *one* tarball for lib/python (in which all the 
> traditional products are in such a 'Products' namespace package). I 
> think that's great news, especially for the traditional deployment route 
> of downloading a tarball.
> 
> It also means that Plone 3.0 would also be installable as eggs, given 
> that somebody would make eggs out of the existing products and the CMF. 
> That's mostly mechanical work, however. Hence, an installation via 
> zc.buildout (using somethinglike ploneout) isn't so far fetched, and you 
> wouldn't even need a special recipe to install products -- you'd just 
> use the egg recipe.
> 
> I thought I'd run this by you guys. Daniel might have even more to say.

It is very interesting. What worries me a bit is how we eggify the 
existing products. Perhaps we need a script to do that. It would almost 
certainly introduce breakage of a lot of svn:externals, since the svn 
layout is different. We'd also depend on Zope (e.g. PAS) and CMF 
products doing this.

If it's something we want to do, we need to do it fairly quickly.

Also, if products are eggs, are they still automatically found (and 
their ZCML processed) at start-up?

I do love Daniel's idea of a Plone egg, so that you could easy_install 
Plone and be done with it. :)

Martin