[Zope-dev] Packaging Zope for Fedora

[Jens Vagelpohl]

On Mar 26, 2008, at 01:12 , Timothy Selivanow wrote:
> I would rather have a package that upstream approves of and  
> participates
> in, than blindly create it in a silo not caring.  It never turns out
> well in the long run with the latter.

You may be fighting windmills here. Previous attempts at creating  
packaged versions, like RPMs, have flopped badly.

On the one hand they tend to be behind the current release quickly. On  
the other hand they tend to introduce their own idea of how things  
should be laid out, which invariably clashes with what the developers/ 
supporters use. They tend to introduce scripts and scaffolding that do  
not exist in the standard tarball, which will lead to blank stares,  
such as start/stop scripts. Also, the goals that are cited for a  
packaged version, such as reproduceability of a given setup, are  
reached by the other installation mechanisms that are used as well, be  
it manually building a tarball or using helpers like zc.buildout.

What it all boils down to (and has boiled down to in the past) is that  
people will be told to abandon the prepackaged version as soon as they  
need any kind of support on the "official" zope mailing lists. The  
notion that you build Zope (and in most cases Python as well) yourself  
instead of using anything pre-packaged is so deeply ingrained that no  
one has ever created a successful distribution-supplied package. Don't  
get me wrong, I'm not making any kind of value judgment, I'm just  
telling you what to expect. You may already be in the situation you  
are trying to avoid because the upstream may never approve of and  
support what you're attempting to do.

jens