Re: Some structural improvements

Toby Dickenson 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.

Thanks!

>>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

At least know the barrier for providing patches to the documentation
(and hence the website, because it is generates from that, not the other
way around) is much much lower. Anyone can get an anonymous CVS checkout
and send the output of 'cvs diff'.

>>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

Ok, I'll start my work on that then.

>>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".

Note that I don't want to reorganize the package layout but the
*repository* layout. In other words, I don't want to mess with the
contents of the packages but the physical (not logical!) location. From
an import location point of view, every .py file would stay where it is.
So, no danger in having stale .pyc files.

Right now, for example, the repository layout suggests that
DirectoryStorageToolkit is a subpackage of DirectoryStorage. Of course,
all of that is only cosmetic and I don't feel too strongly about it...

> (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)

Well, the biggest reason why this went so smooth is because Zope 2 and
Zope 3 share some important low-level technology: ZODB 3.4/3.5 and
ZConfig. Other than that, they can be more viewed like separate
products, really.

Philipp


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