[Distutils] Buildout release news

[Reinout van Rees]

On 08/24/2010 05:47 PM, Gary Poster wrote:
> How would you like to proceed?
>
> 1) We talk about some way of making it so that this kind of recipe can have a "get out of my way" flag to access site-packages.
> 2) We talk about a way to no longer use this recipe.
> 3) We do something else you propose.

Buildout itself supporting system eggs reliably is of course the 
handiest option, so that would be option 2.

It is perhaps handiest if I explain my usecase.  I use buildout for my 
Django projects (with the django recipe being a big piece of the pie). 
Lots of geographical processing, so mapnik, matplotlib, numpy and a 
couple of other not-pure-python packages.

Some of those are notoriously difficult/impossible to install with a 
simple "easy_install" or generic buildout dependency install.  "aptitude 
install python-matplotlib" and friends (or the windows equivalent) is 
the only practical way to get it running.

a) I *do* need the system python.

b) I prefer listing all dependencies (so also the shitty-to-install 
ones) in my setup.py.  So I need to be able to tell buildout to grab 
them from the system packages instead of shooting itself in the foot by 
trying to grab them from pypi.

c) I prefer having buildout search explicitly for these specific 
dependencies and complain when it doesn't find them.  Helps with missing 
libraries.



Now, I looked at the new buildout 1.5 system packages options, but I 
wondered whether it would work fully.  Only the script recipe seems to 
support it at the moment and it didn't look from the documentation that 
such a globally-found dependency would be valid for the entire buildout 
(and all the other parts).  If I use that osc.recipe.sysegg and list 
that part first, it makes sure all other parts use the specified system 
eggs.


Just a minute ago, I tried experimenting with a z3c.recipe.egg part 
mentioned as the first one, but I got an "ImportError: Entry point 
('zc.buildout', 'default') not found".  I haven't updated the bootstrap 
yet, so that might be the cause (though that'd be a bug).


Reinout


-- 
Reinout van Rees - reinout at vanrees.org - http://reinout.vanrees.org
Programmer at http://www.nelen-schuurmans.nl
"Military engineers build missiles. Civil engineers build targets"