Packaging Zope 2.12

[Michael Mulich]

I've been charged with packaging Zope 2.12 and Plone 4.0 for our 
organization's hosting service. I'm fairly new to Debian packaging, but 
I have been maintaining a few packages in our local repository.[0][1]

I thought I would approach the list to see if anyone else is working on 
packaging Zope (>=2.12). I'm picking up where my colleague, Erik Rose, 
left off. I'm familiar with the buildout issues with Debian packaging. 
I've got some ideas about how to package Zope2.12 and Plone without 
using buildout.

So far, I've been trying to bridge the gap between development and 
production of Plone sites. I would have liked to have been able to use 
the Python packaging tools to create a version of Plone that works for 
both the developer and the system administrator. Rough example:
     Developer would use: pip install plone
     Administrator would use something like: aptitude install zope-plone4
And after that the developer and system administrator would interact 
with the environment in similar ways. However, the Python packaging 
tools are inadequate; and so the above approach doesn't work for the 
developer. My dreams of bridging the developer/admin gap at this point 
have been smashed. Therefore, I'm going to focus all my energy on 
packaging Plone4 and therefore Zope2.12 for Debian and Debian alone. 
Hopefully I'll be able to come back to bridging the gap after distutils2 
has been released.

Is anyone else interested in packaging Zope2.12? I'm sure there are 
interested parties, but they probably don't have the time. What I'm 
mostly looking for is someone to review my work, since (like I said 
above) I'm fairly new to Debian packaging. I'll appreciate any help you 
can give. Thanks.

[0] https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/browser/weblion/hosting/packages
[1] https://weblion.psu.edu/trac/weblion/wiki/PackagesInEachDistribution

-Michael Mulich (pumazi)