[Product-Developers] ANN: plone-devstart (please help test)

Jens W. Klein jens at bluedynamics.com
Tue Mar 13 18:14:37 UTC 2012


On 13.03.2012 18:17, David Glick (GW) wrote:
>
> On Mar 13, 2012, at 10:00 AM, Alex Clark wrote:
>
>> On 3/10/12 5:15 PM, Martin Aspeli wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Somewhat inspired by the goals of the ``plone.api`` initiative and based
>>> on the experience of seeing many, many people struggle to get a "safe"
>>> Plone development up and running due to problems with polluted system
>>> Python interpreters, missing libraries and confusing buildouts, I have
>>> created a script called ``plone-devstart.py``.
>>
>>
>> +0
>>
>> In the interest of stop energy (kidding)… but seriously: can we not go
>> in this direction, if at all possible? Or at least think out loud a bit
>> more before first.
>>
>> My thoughts:
>>
>> We've spent years getting Plone situated in a "nice" place within the
>> Python community. To address the concerns of the ``plone.api`` folks and
>> anyone that has trouble installing or developing add-ons for Plone, I
>> would strongly recommend that we adhere very closely to "Python best
>> practices"[1].
>>
>> Now, I completely understand Martin's motivation here and may personally
>> be interested in trying plone-devstart.py to see what he has come up
>> with. But I don't think, at least my gut reaction tells me, that a
>> project-specific script is not what we need or want more of here[2].
>>
>> Think about it this way: the Plone project has very ambitious goals with
>> regard to CMS functionality, and a limited set of developers to
>> accomplish those goals. We don't want those resources spent on Python
>> module installation problems, if we can help it. Better to offload that
>> problem to the worldwide community of Python folks IMHO for "free"
>> support.
>>
>>
>> Alex
>>
>>
>> [1] Support: "pip install -r 4.2.x.txt Plone" ASAP. Failures with this
>> process become "general Python failures" not "Plone specific failures".
>> Don't have PIL? "pip install Pillow" and so on. Let requirements.txt
>> equal versions.cfg in effect, and let's figure out how to build out a
>> bunch of zcml slugs without buildout. (Actually, with Pillow, it's
>> probably now "safe" to depend on it in the way we depend on Zope2.
>> Installation problems have been practically eliminated for all major
>> OSes. The only "gotcha" is C extensions, but Zope2 has those too. Oh and
>> PIL's deps, but the Unified Installer includes those for its purposes
>> and anyone that can type "pip install Plone" can probably type
>> "{aptitude,brew,etc} install libjpeg-dev" and so on.)
>>
>> [2] One exception may be if "pip install plone-devstart" were supported.
>>
>
> I'm all in favor of moving toward supporting a more "standard Python"
> installation approach, but I think something along the lines of Martin's
> plone-devstart script would be useful even then. I'd rather run a script
> which checks to make sure everything is installed and installs the
> missing things than have to remember all the steps myself. If we can
> build those checks into Plone's setup.py though, so much the better --
> so I'd much rather consider Martin's script as very useful research
> toward that end rather than as a "wrong direction."
>
> David

But isnt there a widely spreaded tool for doing so: GNU Autoconf and GNU 
Automake? It can check if preconditions for building PIL and Zope2 
C-Extensions are meet. This would then end up in a classic CMMI cycle. 
And at the end (after make install step) at given target theres a plone 
(dev?) environment.

Jens
-- 
Klein & Partner KG, member of BlueDynamics Alliance



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