[Zope-Coders] Signal forwarding

[Ken Manheimer]

While we're talking about the pid files, i want to mention a limitation in
the current scheme that prevents us from using the same startup scripts to 
concurrently start multiple ZEO instances.

Z2.py takes flags that let you specify the location of log files, but
there is no provision to specify an alternate place for the pid files.  
If there was an option that let you specify the var directory to be used,
for instance, then it would be easy to run a second ZEO instance from the
setup for a first one, without clobbering the pid files for the first.

There's plenty of good reasons to want to be able to do this.

In production, it would be nice to be able to start a few instances of the
site from the same installation - you would only have to create alternate
var directories.  

As a developer or maintainer you sometimes want to be able to spelunk
around a site and try changes to products - to develop them, or debug
problems - while comparing with operation of the regularly running site.  
(It would also be nice to be able to extend the path from which products
are sought, using a flag, so you could shadow one product or another in
your special instance, to try variations.  In any case, you would need to 
be careful about data-structure compatabity of the different versions of 
the products, but that's always the case across ZEO instances.)

What do people think?  Achieving this would take fairly small changes, and 
would enable some valuable operating modes...

-- 
Ken
klm@zope.com