buildout: experiances

dear developers

i tried and succeeded to install silva on macosx 10.5 (leopard) using  
the buildout feature and the silva-2.0 branch and the base.cfg  
configuration. nonetheless, there were a few small issues, not all of  
them are operation system dependent. bear in mind that i have never  
used buildout before...

- problems accepting certificates: the bin/buildout program is non- 
interactive. therefore, i have no chance to accept the certificates  
from plone.org, codespeak.net, etc. the buildout program just stops  
with an error like

   Server certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted

to work around this problem, i made a manual svn checkout from those  
domains using a nonexistent path just to accept the certificate  
permanently. i'm sure there is a better way to do this and this could  
probably be included into the buildout program.

- buildout/Silva-2.0/parts/zopeinstance/etc/zope.conf included these  
two lines although these directories were not created by the buildout  
program:

   products /path/to/buildout/Silva-2.0/parts/silva-extra-svn
   products /path/to/buildout/Silva-2.0/parts/silva-extra-dist

- wrong permissions on buildout/Silva-2.0/var. in buildout/Silva-2.0/ 
parts/zopeinstance/etc/zope.conf the effective-user is defined to be  
"zope". shouldn't the program then adjust the permissions accordingly?

- starting zope: what is the login and password for the inituser? when  
creating a zope instance by hand we know it,  but with buildout we  
don't. so i just created a new inituser file.

- there is a newer zope version with bug fixes (2.10.5-final).

- pil does not support jpg out-of-the box on macosx (known issue). how  
does one fix certain operating system dependent issues like the jpg  
support on macosx using the buildout system?

- the buildout silva-2.0 directory looks quite messy for a noob;-)

i don't think that having buildout makes the creation of complete  
installers obsolete. buildout cannot be used by people not having  
already installed python and compilers. and i really like to have my  
own installation of python  (version independence, don't break system  
maintenance tools like up2date, yum, etc.).

regards,
marc