Some structural improvements

Hello everyone,

I've recently started looking into DirectoryStorage since I need to use
it with Zope 3. Trying that has been a pretty smooth ride so far thanks
to Toby's fixes for Zope 2.8/ZODB 3.4. Some smaller adjustments that I
had to make to get it running have been made on the
philikon-zope3-support-branch which is already waiting to be reviewed by
Toby and then merged to the HEAD.

When I wanted to document my changes, I realized that the documentation
was kept in a .zexp file and the text docs as well as the website were
generated from that. With Toby's consent I converted all docs (including
those that were only available on the website) to reStructuredText, a
plain text format commonly accepted in the Python community. I also
added a tool that lets Toby generate the website from the reST docs.
These changes went to the philikon-restify-docs-branch which I hereby
also submit for review and merging to HEAD. Please let me know if you
have suggestions or improvements.

My last suggestion in the line structural improvements is to use a
distutils-style setup. Most Python projects, whether tiny or big, have
adopted the standard "setup.py install" method of installing themselves
in a Python library directory, especially those that have C extensions
(DirStorage has the readdir.c extension). With a distutils-style setup,
you could say

  $ python setup.py install --home=/usr/local/Zope-2.8.1

or for a Zope 3.1 instance

  $ python setup.py install --home=~/instances/zope31-w-dirstorage

to compile and install DirStorage accordingly. I also understand that
this eases the creation of self-extracting Windows installers
(http://www.python.org/doc/current/dist/postinstallation-script.html)

Along with a distutils-like setup, I would also propose to reorganize
the repository layout to be a bit clearer. Most Python projects that
I've come across seem to have adopted something like this:

  DirStorage/
  DirStorage/doc/
  DirStorage/src/
  DirStorage/src/DirectoryStorage/
  DirStorage/src/DirectoryStorageToolkit/
  DirStroage/setup.py

If I hear no objections, I will begin my work shortly on the
philikon-distutils-reorg-branch.

Best regards

Philipp


-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO
September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices
Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA
Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf