[python] Plone on Gentoo?

[Andrew Yochum]

Genny,

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 11:42:02AM +0200, lists at genoverly.net wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:25:11 -0400
> Andrew Yochum <andrew at plexpod.com> wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone out there run Plone on Gentoo built from portage?  Is it
> > well maintained? Any tips, gotchas, etc?
> > 
> 
> In general, I have found portage is very hot and very tight.  

I agree.  But when you've experienced the hairiness of zope+cmf
dependencies in the wild you'll understand why I'm asking! ;-)
 
> I have not installed Plone on Gentoo, but I have a few Gentoo boxen
> around.  We could do an installfest if you want and find out if you
> like what you see!
> 
> I did a quick search on bugzilla and did not find much:
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/
> I have found their forums to be a *really* valuable resource:
> http://forums.gentoo.org/.  I found this little snippet dated April 16,
> 2005.. it looks simple.

Yeah - some reason I missed that in my googling and got by with the
Italian howto.
 
> Let me know how it goes,

If you had read my full message, you might've found my somewhat suttle
last sentence that I had a working install when I first wrote ;-) ...

> > 	http://sprint.zope.it/Doc/Zope/howto/plone_gentoo
> > Though, my Italian is limited to that which I can glean from knowing
> > Spanish.  The obvious bits + a lot of previous Zope+CMF knowledge got me
> > a working install relatively painlessly.`

A bit about that install...

It works, seems to be fully functional.  I'm guessing I  probably would
have seen the typical Gentoo setup guide after "emerge -v zope"
instructing me to use zope-config to setup an instance, but I did a
"emerge -v plone" and well, I missed it. Definite a small fault of the
process, not just a Plone/Zope thing but a emerge thing.

There were a dozen or so dependencies that were also emerged, all Zope
"Products" that CMF + Plone use.  These needed to be added to the zope
instance I created with zope-config by using zprod-manager.  The way
zprod-manager does this seems to be similar to the way gentoo's
webapp-config works - it copies the desired version of the product into
the destination instance of zope and adds it to a little metadata file
listing the installed Products in that instance.

So, my current summary of Plone on Gentoo goes like this:
Upon first emerging Plone you get a full set of packages that when added
to a zope instance will give a properly working Plone instance, assuming
the package maintainers did their dependency homework.  When updating
Plone (and its dependencies) via portage, your instance of Plone will
not be updated - you'll have to do this with zprod-manager by hand.
This could possibly be a PITA because of the list of dependencies Plone
has, and zprod-manager doesn't seem to pay attention to them - doh! But
if you just leave it alone, you should be OK, but you might be stuck
with a bug riddled version of some Products.

My tenative conclusion: Gentoo doesn't seem to make managing
Zope+CMF+Plone much (if at all) easier than doing so by hand.  What it
does do is get the packages locally on the machine for you to copy into
your instance.  What it doesn't do is dependency management and
installation of Products in your zope instance.

I may be particularly sensitive to the issues related this as my
experience with Zope+CMF is mostly in the instance of a custom
Plone-like CMF-based CMS that could be basically considered
internal/consultingware.  We experienced lots of headaches in upgrading
to newer versions of CMF and related Zope Products because of API
changes and new side-effects of them.

Plone is more like shrinkwrap OSS.  Because of the situation of Plone in
the latter, it should be much easier to deal with the scenario of
wanting/needing to update your instance.  And, it should be clear is not
a problem particular to Gentoo, nor is it the Gentoo or gentoo's Plone
package maintainer's task to solve this problem for the Zope+CMF+Plone
worlds.  I may be overestimatig the problem here, too, but I think it
clearly exists.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Yochum
Plexpod
andrew at plexpod.com
718-360-0879