[Distutils] Buildout release news

[Jim Fulton]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Gary Poster <gary.poster at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 27, 2010, at 3:59 PM, Reinout van Rees wrote:
>
>> On 08/27/2010 04:12 PM, Gary Poster wrote:
>>>
>>> I realize that a system Python happened to work for you before.
>>>
>>> That's a bit awkward, because with pre-1.5.0 zc.buildout, using a system Python was not supported.
>>>
>>> Therefore, your recipe was not supported.
>>
>> "my recipe"?  osc.recipe.sysegg is not something that *I* made, I'm just using it.  "Is not supported" sounds like a helpdesk telling me "linux is not supported".
>>
>> And "not supported"?  osc.recipe.sysegg installs the specific eggs I tell it to find (in the system python) as develop eggs.  A nice trick that works pretty well.
>
> ...Not sure what to tell you there.  Jim has been clear from the beginning that system Pythons were not supported  with buildout.  I added support.  Anything before then happened to work.

I'm not sure I agree with this. :) Technically, you're right, in that
I didn't offer any sympathy or support for people who had trouble
using unclean Pythons (defined as Python installations that differ
from a build from source).

Still, I expected buildout to use anything found in the Python it was
bootstrapped with, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that
implied. :)  This seemed the most conservative approach at the time
and didn't cost me anything because I've never found it burdonsome to
provide clean Python installes separate from the system Python.

While, I think my decision was raesonable, I came to regret it.  I
prefer the approach taken by virtualenv to provide isolation by
default and provide a way to relax it.

My preferance is that buildout provide isolated and non-isolated modes
and that the isolation apply equally to recipes, extensions, and eggs
installed by parts.  I'd be inclined to have buildout be non-islated
by default, for backwards compatibility, and switch the default in
buildout 2.  I say all of this having done none of the recent work. :)

Jim

--
Jim Fulton