Re: Building installers based on ploneout

Hi,

Sidnei da Silva wrote:
> For the next installer cycle, I would like to start building the
> installers based on ploneout. What does that mean?

Wichert showed interest in replacing the whole dist_plone scripts with a
solution based on ploneout or rather zc.buildout, as that script is
showing its age and becomes a bit hard to extend in times of eggs.

> - Fetching all the products and dependencies
> - Adding OS-specific utilities
> - Packaging up the final directory as a installer
> 
> What is your opinion on this? Does it sound like its doable? I believe
> most people are building based on the Plone tarball except me? There
> is a problem with building based on the Plone tarball which is we
> cannot build installers until the tarball is ready, and if the tarball
> is broken we need to wait for another tarball.

In general I think it is safe to build all the installers based on the
same configuration files, rather than a tarball if that configuration
file is specific enough to not let discrepancies in included versions to
sneak in (for example external dependencies might get new releases on
the CheeseShop, we need to pin point them down to one exact version
which we tested).

Right now the simplest solution to prevent the problem of waiting for
the tarball would be to include the dist_plone --download and dist_plone
--build steps into the Windows installer, so we would could have nightly
tarballs.

The second approach could indeed be to rewrite the whole installer
generation or rather refactor it to use zc.buildout. I think buildout
gives us some nice advantages when handling eggs and there are recipes
to download and unpack tarballs but pretty much everything else would
need new recipes to be written. Writing those recipes isn't complicated,
it's just a bit of work.

I would be willing to help with this effort, but don't have any free
cycles for that before June.

Hanno


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