[Zope-Coders] silly windows request

[Chris McDonough]

On Tue, 2002-10-08 at 22:33, Tim Peters wrote:
> I don't want to argue about this, so I'll just express that I think the
> exercise is pointless.  Anyone installing Zope had better be a developer,
> and any developer had better know where they installed Python, and know how
> to run it without spoon-feeding.  Writing a robust .bat file is very
> difficult even under cmd.exe -- and even *assuming* the user has set the
> magic registry entry needed to enable the cmd.exe extensions (not all
> versions of cmd.exe come out of the box capable of understanding the stuff
> we're trying to use here).
> 
> If we have developers who need a megabyte+ "of stuff" to remember where they
> put Python, we need a better class of developer <wink>.
> 

This is very true for win32.  The Win32 configure script was more of a
silly weekend project than a stab at anything, um.. good.  It'll be at
best a tool for helping to build the binary release.

The existence of a configure script in general is to give us a way to
fend off the questions that arise from users trying to install/run Zope
under an a known-bad or feature-impaired version of Python than it is a
way to prevent users from needing to know where they installed Python
(beacuse they probably didn't).

This is obviously more of a problem under UNIX where a user probably:

  -  is more likely to install from source

  -  is more likely to have many different Python versions
     already installed on his system, probably none of which
     is the right one.

We'd like to automatically let a user who installs the source release
know that he needs to use a particular Python version and that he might
need to enable large file support for that interpreter, etc. or suffer
the consequences of not doing so.  We know he won't read the docs, but
we stand a shot of getting his attention during the install process.

It's also kind of nice to be able to use the "./configure; make; make
install" idiom to install Zope.  It's nice to be able to fulfill
people's expectations of an autoconf-style install process on UNIX. 
It's.. um.. *a* way of doing it. ;-)

- C