[Distutils] Organizing for buildout questions

[David Pratt]

Hi. I am trying to get my head around using buildout with both private 
and public repositories. So my questions relate to a way to organize my 
svn in a better way for eggification and construction of a simple 
sandbox to keep my svn checkouts together in a consistent and portable 
way. The goal is to checkout sources, modifying and checking in my 
changes as I go, and having the buildouts in their own folders reflect 
the changing code and dependencies.

My first couple of questions are whether buildout can use a folder as 
source for a (development) egg - something that will update, secondly 
whether an egg can be created with ssh to a private repository like:

svn+ssh://myaccount@myrepo.example.com/usr/home/myaccount/svn/path 
/to/my/project

I have been using ssh for private code sources.

In a recent buildout I have been studying, I have seen this:

find-links = http://download.zope.org/distribution/

I am also looking at a simple sandbox structure that could also make 
some sense ...

development --+-- private-src (private checked out sources)
               |
               +-- public-src (external checked out sources)
               |
               +-- buildout (a container for my active buildouts)

My source containers would just hold folders of checked out code I am 
currently working on. I plan on checking out my buildouts from svn to a 
buildout container so that I could have a few or more different 
buildouts going at a time (each being an app or just testing some things 
in their own environment)

I am curious about folders as sources since sometimes I just want to try 
some code without a lot of hassle or committing it to a repository right 
away. I think it would be good to try it in a buildout. With the 
structure of my development folder I could use a relative link from a 
source folder as well.

On the repository side, I have been looking at zope's repository more 
critically which is structured like this:

container-->branch-->src-->namespace-->package

or when more nesting needed:

container-->branch-->src-->namespace-->second namespace-->package

setup.py is always at the branch with __init__ for eggs within each 
namespace package. It seems a good model for eggification since many 
packages are setup for eggs in a way that is fairly transparent. This of 
course is a public repository with packages being registered in PyPI.

For a private repository, I would like to checkout the code as eggs 
equally as well.

Any recommendations would be appreciated since I am not looking to do 
this sort of housekeeping any more than once in a long while. I am 
hoping with input I can get it fairly right and flexible.

It seems now is the time to do this to prepare for buildout style 
development and packaging.  Many thanks.

Regards,
David