Packaging Zope 2.12

[Jonas Meurer]

Hey Michael,

On 14/07/2010 Michael Mulich wrote:
> I've been charged with packaging Zope 2.12 and Plone 4.0 for our
> organization's hosting service. I'm fairly new to Debian packaging,
> but I have been maintaining a few packages in our local
> repository.[0][1]
> 
> I thought I would approach the list to see if anyone else is working
> on packaging Zope (>=2.12). I'm picking up where my colleague, Erik
> Rose, left off. I'm familiar with the buildout issues with Debian
> packaging. I've got some ideas about how to package Zope2.12 and
> Plone without using buildout.

that's great news. I intended to package zope2.12 for debian when I have
time to learn buildout, but so far I didn't manage to do so. I was
already co-maintainer of zope2.8 to zope2.11, and I'm very interested in
zope2.12 debian packages.

> So far, I've been trying to bridge the gap between development and
> production of Plone sites. I would have liked to have been able to
> use the Python packaging tools to create a version of Plone that
> works for both the developer and the system administrator. Rough
> example:
>     Developer would use: pip install plone
>     Administrator would use something like: aptitude install zope-plone4
> And after that the developer and system administrator would interact
> with the environment in similar ways. However, the Python packaging
> tools are inadequate; and so the above approach doesn't work for the
> developer. My dreams of bridging the developer/admin gap at this
> point have been smashed. Therefore, I'm going to focus all my energy
> on packaging Plone4 and therefore Zope2.12 for Debian and Debian
> alone. Hopefully I'll be able to come back to bridging the gap after
> distutils2 has been released.
> 
> Is anyone else interested in packaging Zope2.12? I'm sure there are
> interested parties, but they probably don't have the time. What I'm
> mostly looking for is someone to review my work, since (like I said
> above) I'm fairly new to Debian packaging. I'll appreciate any help
> you can give. Thanks.

I for sure can help you with packaging issues, but unfortunately I don't
know much about buildout and all that distutils stuff. Maybe we can work
together in order to package zope2.12, that would be awesome.

Do you know the pkg-zope SVN repository? It already has a zope2.12
directory, but I guess that most of debian/rules (the makefile used to
build the package) needs to be rewritten. You can find the repos at
svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-zope/zope2.12

If I got it right, the main difference between zope2.11 and zope2.12
build system is, that zope2.12 no longer contains the required zope
dependencies (libraries developed for zope). Instead it uses some
buildout receipe to fetch these dependencies as python eggs, and builds
something like a full python environment, including all required python
dependencies.

So one issue with packaging is how to make the dependencies available to
the build process. Fetching them from internet is not an option at all.
Unfortunately the dependencies break even for minor version changes (in
other words: they don't ensure backwards compability), thus packaging
all the zope libs as seperate packages is not an option either. Thus the
only option is to distribute all required eggs within the zope package
tarball, which is a bad solution security-wise.

Another issue is how to build the zope/python environment in a FHS
compliant way: placing the different parts of zope (libraries, logs,
configs) at places similar to legacy zope versions: with relative paths,
using the system python interpreter instead of a local copy, etc.

And last but not least instances need to be seperated from the global
zope2.12 files in a similar way as done up to zope2.11. continuing
support for the debian 'dzhandle' utility for managing zope instances,
products and extensions should be the goal.

greetings,
 jonas
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