[python-uk] Suggestions / best practices for deployment

[Matt Hamilton]

On 16 May 2013, at 11:22, Tim Diggins wrote:

> PS at the risk of starting a flame war: "zc.buildout"… --shudder-- 
> Feels like there are two different python communities sometimes, those that use zope-derived rather java-flavoured tools and mindset, and the rest.

I don't want to start a flamewar either, but I am interested in what exactly makes you shudder about zc.buildout?

I agree with you about the two separate communities…well to a degree. When Zope started way back when, there was no best practise, and so it had to create its own path. There were a lot of mistakes along the way, and a lot of lessons learnt. But there were a lot of things that were way more advanced than anything out there at the time. There was no easy_install, pip, eggs… even PyPI (the cheeseshop) was in its infancy.

Zope2 was a massive beast with quite a bit of momentum and it took quite some time to re-align it with the best practise as it emerged.  

But these days, it is very 'pythonic' and fits in with the rest of the community pretty will I think. I think the people that generally run screaming when the hear anything mentioned that starts with a 'z' are those that experienced Zope in its teenage years when it was transitioning to follow best practice.

The Zope community was doing big web application deployments over a decade ago and needed tools to manage deployment, configuration management, etc and so had to build those tools as the term 'devops' had not even been invented yet. A lot of knowledge, experience, pain, and ultimately success has come out of that community, and I always feel a bit sad when it is written off by people who don't like the smell/flavour of it.

The Pyramid developers took their knowledge and experience of Zope and learnt from its shortcomings and successes and went on to create something that really is truly awesome. I wish there was more of that in the Python community.

-Matt

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