[Distutils] Buildout release news

[Gary Poster]

On Aug 25, 2010, at 5:50 AM, Reinout van Rees wrote:

> 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.

Sorry for not replying sooner.  FWIW, including me directly in the distribution list will get faster replies.

> 
> 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.

We have similar requirements.

> 
> 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.  

As I said, the requirements sound the same to me.

> 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.

But then you are susceptible to many problems that occur in system Pythons that I've been debugging for this release.

Which django recipe do you use, by the way?  I intend to update djangorecipe, using some changes that Attila made.

> 
> 
> 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".  

If you can help me dupe, I'm happy to look at it.

> I haven't updated the bootstrap yet, so that might be the cause (though that'd be a bug).

If it is that you didn't update the bootstrap, then I stated it was one of the requirements. :-)  Not inclined to call it a bug.

Gary