[Distutils] [buildout] buildout 1.5 sometime ever please?

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I've been waiting for years for a release of buildout that contains
proper isolation from Python's site-packages. The non-isolation is a
major flaw in buildout that makes it SO much harder to write proper
installation instructions for software such as Grok.

We need to wrap Grok's buildout installation using virtualenv
--no-site-packages. I just discovered that this installation actually
fails if I use an ubuntu-installed virtualenv (or setuptools)! It works
with a manually installed version of either, and I'm sure the problem is 
somewhere in z3c.autoinclude too, but it's still an issue.

Last year in september I hacked up some code that would do the
isolation. I was then informed that Gary Poster was working on a branch
instead, and indeed the branch I saw then looked much improved in
features. So I waited. I saw new versions of the branch come and go and
I'm not sure what's going on, but I waited.

I noticed that in april there was a beta release of buildout that
featured such improvements. This release was then withdrawn and
overridden with 1.50b2 with the message:

"This is a re-release of 1.4.3 to hide the brown-bag release of 1.5.0b1.
The changes in 1.5.0b1 will reappear as 1.5.0 soon, when the additional
reported problems have been addressed."

It is now july, so I'm starting to get my doubts about the word "soon".
Have the reported problems been addressed? Is there any hope I can get a 
buildout that actually provides proper isolation sometime? Can I help?

Regards,

Martijn