Re: Some structural improvements

On Monday 12 Sep 2005 16:07, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> 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.

Now merged. Many thanks to Philipp for tackling this. Note that the minimum 
requirements for DirectoryStorage havent changed; this still supports down to 
Zope 2.6.

> 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. 

DirectoryStorage documentation has been stagnant for a while. (When that 
happens to code we call it 'stable', and it is a desirable characteristic. 
One thing Ive learned from DirectoryStorage is that Documentation doesnt get 
the same advantages from that type of stability). This is bad.

> 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. 

Im not sure what I think about this yet ;-) The main goal has to be to make it 
easier to capture more community contributions into the documentation - and I 
know I am a poor judge of processes to achieve that goal. I echo Philipp's 
request:

> 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.

+1

> Along with a distutils-like setup, I would also propose to reorganize
> the repository layout to be a bit clearer. 

-1..... I am sure Im not the only one with scripts that reference the old file 
locations, and other issues like stale .pyc files mean we would need a more 
substantial gain than making the layout "a bit clearer".

(FWIW, I am amazed it has been possible to move from Zope 2.x to Zope 3 
without requiring other changes and breakage which would overshadow my 
concerns here. The move from Zope 1 was never so easy. Congratulations to the 
Zope 3 team - this is a good example of the right way to manage change)






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