Re: Plone 4.0a4 tagged

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 7:43 PM, Alex Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Also, we only have SteveM and Sidnei and building installers now right?
>>>
>>> (I *might* want to get into the installer game in 2010, namely to produce
>>>  buildout-based .debs and .rpms…)

Actually, I had missed this part. Can you elaborate a little more on
what those .debs would contain? I mean, it would be interesting to
create a .deb from each egg and a meta-package that pins hard
dependencies from versions.cfg, but at the same time this could result
in dependency mess.

I have some ambitious plans about this, but maybe they are too
ambitious to be feasible. :)

Just to tease a little bit, the focus of the Launchpad team currently
is in the 'Ubuntu Distributed Development' effort, which basically
boils down to every single upstream release imported into Bazaar, then
distro-specific branches for Debian and Ubuntu 'stacked on' the
pristine tarball branch, and finally a 'build from branch'
functionality that can generate nightly tarballs off a live branch
into a PPA. It will be very exciting!

On top of that I would like to implement two things: a
PyPI-to-Launchpad bridge that would implement the PyPI upload API in
one side and use launchpadlib to push source eggs into Launchpad
projects, also creating a branch from the pristine source release. The
second thing would be a puller watching the official PyPI RSS feed and
importing new releases as they are made. That, combined with the above
could enable people to easily have .deb packages available minutes
after the source release is uploaded to PyPI.

>> I usually pay attention to this mailing list yeah, but it might take
>> up to a week or too until I reboot into Windows (yes, I've been that
>> busy recently).
>
> Heh, I hear you! Can you briefly outline the process for building the
> Windows installer? I'm considering soliciting the community for $$$ to
> pay for a Windows 7 license for my Parallels, so I can help you. Do
> I need anything else like a C compiler?

If you're buying a Windows 7 license, be aware that there are legal
ways to get it cheaper (see
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/351598/how-to-buy-windows-7-for-50-less-the-truth-about-oem-versions).

For the Python 2.4-based installers, you would need a license of
Visual Studio 2003, though mingw might get you very far (I never used
it myself). For Python 2.6, the Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition
does just fine. It's even possible to build for x64 if you have a x64
version of Windows and the latest Platform SDK, though there's some
convoluted environment variable setup (I have a .bat file with the
gory details).

As for building the installer itself, it's largely based on Enfold
Server, which has an extra .cfg file listing distutils extensions that
are not egg-based to be shipped with the installer. It downloads the
source release of Python extracts it and copies some .dlls into the
directory, then extracts those distutils binaries into the same tree.
After that, things get pretty normal. It runs the buildout with this
'clean' Python, then runs Inno Setup with a custom .iss template to
include all of the buildout directory + the custom-built Python
directory and unpack everything on the right place.

The last part is signing the installer, for which you need a
certificate (similar to an SSL certificate). The current installer is
signed by Enfold Systems' certificate. I would say the Plone
Foundation should acquire a certificate.

Alternatively, instead of setting up your own environment for building
the installer, we could arrange to have you use Enfold Systems'
buildout, which already has all of this setup! The configuration files
for the installer are all on Plone's SVN, and the buildout at Enfold
is setup to build from SVN and upload the installer to a public
location (though that bit might be broken right now), so there's
really no need for a full environment unless you want to debug
something.

>> I'm interested in producing a 'Plone Cluster in a box' installer soon,
>> basically a fabric script that sets up a Plone cluster on EC2 or UEC
>> (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud). I think that's even more valuable than a
>> .deb. Nate Aune has some experience with this and might be able to
>> contribute some or even all of the solution.
>
> Sure, I won't argue the usefulness of that. Personally I'm heading in
> the direction of toppcloud and EZ deployments to Rackspace Cloud. But
> that stuff is not ready for prime time yet.
>
> Further, when I see projects like Zenoss shipping debs it makes me
> sad and jealous that we don't have the same ;-) Our unified installer
> is the equivalent of their "stack" installer (and even better built
> IMO since it's buildout based) but we have no equivalent in the
> native packages department.

So let me know what are your plans on this.

-- Sidnei

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