[Distutils] alternatives to zc.buildout?

Tres Seaver tseaver at palladion.com
Sat Feb 9 20:32:32 CET 2008


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Martin Aspeli wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
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>> Chris Withers wrote:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> What are the alternatives to zc.buildout?
>>>
>>> I'm wondering before I plough into zc.buildout because I'm guessing 
>>> other big projects have run into the problem of pinning certain versions 
>>> of eggs, building "instance homes" for projects, using a mixture of 
>>> "public" eggs and those that are private and for a specific project, etc 
>>> and otherwise working round limitations in setuptools...
>> The major competitor for mindshare is probably Ian Bicking's
>> 'virtualenv':  it makes using 'easy_install' *really* easy, because you
>> are working in a sandbox.
>  >
>> The standard installs for repoze.zope2, repoze.grok, repoze.plone, etc.
>> all assume a virtualenv, and add scripts which turn the vanilla
>> virtualenv into an "instance."
> 
> The problem I have with virtualenv - or rather, with raw setuptools 
> based solutions - is that it's difficult to uninstall eggs. With 
> buildout, once you remove the requirement/egg line and re-run buildout, 
> the egg is no longer installed.

My major beef with zc.buildout is perhaps actually a problem with the
recipes nearly everybody uses:  they blow away hand-edited stuff without
warning.  In particular, changes to things like the zope.conf file get
zapped, because buildout (or the recipe) thinks that the file is its own
personal property.

> That said, I like virtualenv and use it a lot. I just think it solves a 
> slightly different use case from the "repeatable configuration 
> management system" one that buildout tries to solve.

My sense is that zc.buildout's focus on "production deployment" usecass
is the source of a lot of my frustration with it as a developer:  I
expect to "inhabit" the environment it creates, which is completely
irrelvant in a production rollout.


Tres.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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