On Oct 25, 2008, at 1:55 PM, Justin Ryan wrote:

My concern is that, of course, buildout expects dev-eggs to be in src/ when its' run,

No it doesn't.  buildout is based on setuptools, which is based on distutils and builds on any mechanisms they provide, which are very flexible. Use of src directories is a common and generally convenient convention.

A great point.  I meant to say, it expects them to be accessible before any parts are built out, AFAIK.

No.  buildout doesn't care when develop eggs are created. If you use the buildout develop option to create develop eggs, then they are created early.  If you use the zc.recipe.egg:develop recipe, or some other recipe that creates develop eggs, then you can create them later.

It seems that I would have to run buildout twice for the develop eggs to be available, if they are downloaded in a recipe, but perhaps I'm working on an incorrect assumption.

You are. See above.

After sending this message, I started wondering if a plugin would be more appropriate than a recipe, using a recipe just seems simpler at the outset because there are existing recipes to start with, at least for SVN.

Recipes work find for your use case afaict.

Note that this policy sometimes gets buildout into trouble since system installs often have the same type as develop eggs in setuptools.  I'm considering having buildout only prefer develop eggs found in it's develop-eggs directory.  I'm also, belatedly, planning to add an option to buildout to ignore site packages, which would also avoid this problem.

Seems to me that virtualenv is the answer to this problem, but it's not perfect.

It would be wildly simpler to just get buildout to ignore site-packages. :)