[Distutils] alternatives to zc.buildout?

[Ian Bicking]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> 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.

This was also something that drove me nuts.  It's too bad this is still 
the case.

We have a build tool ourselves, very similar in scope to zc.buildout, 
though I don't really have intentions at this time to make it a 
legitimate project for other people to use.  But, for the record: 
http://www.openplans.org/projects/fassembler/

One of the core parts of it is filemaker, which does most of the 
interaction with the system: 
https://svn.openplans.org/svn/fassembler/trunk/fassembler/filemaker.py

It goes to great length to notice changes, even if they aren't due to 
edits; I find it's nice to know what exactly is going on.  It's also got 
a bit of support for detecting why things changed, by saving the 
template, and probably will grow support for detecting user changes so 
some things can be overwritten without warning.  With these build things 
I don't really care who owns what, since that's mostly an abstract 
concept that the build user won't know and shouldn't really have to 
know.  (filemaker was generally based on the code from paster create)

I also pay a lot of attention to logging, as I hate noisy output and of 
course not enough output is also a problem.  I can't remember how 
zc.buildout acts in that respect.

   Ian