[Zope-dev] Opinions wanted: clean distribution

[Matt Behrens]

Lennart Regebro wrote:

> One little note: Only people with their noses deep down in Unix will
> understand concepts like 'etc' and 'var'. Remoddeling the distribution may
> be a good idea, but it should then be made more obvious to everybody. It
> must be possible to find names that are easy to understand even for
> Windows-damaged people like me. Maybe call var 'data' instead?


I think my idea here is to make a UNIX installation of Zope look more 
like any other respectable UNIX program.  This is really an issue for 
documentation.  OTOH, don't worry about being forced to run it this way 
-- my quest is just to make it the default for a new install, not a 
requirement.  I think running Zope inside the source tree is valuable 
for development (i.e. non-production) environments and I'd like to keep 
that ability.

> In /etc the suggestions so far only seem to want to put inituser, access and
> config, which would leave that empty for many, or most, installations. :-)


You would always have a config, actually.  You'd need it, so your z2.py 
startup options could be specified (the start/stop scripts would be 
replaced by zopectl start and zopectl stop, much like a lot of other 
programs that run as daemons these days).

> And also, I too would want to put all the standard stuff that comes with
> Zope into $HOME/lib, but have a $HOME/products or somesuch for user
> installed products.


The idea here is to certainly permit you to do that 
(VARDIR/zope/INSTANCE/Products, or some such), but when products are 
packaged by the OS packager or perhaps by the new product installation 
system, they get installed into LIBDIR/zope/site-products and are 
symlinked into VARDIR/zope/INSTANCE/Products by the installation 
scripts.  (Toby, the more coffee I have, the better I like the symlink 
idea.) :-)  That way you can also pick and choose the products you want 
out of the machine installation into each of your instances.

-- 
Matt Behrens <matt.behrens@kohler.com>
System Analyst, Baker Furniture