Packaging question for Zope3 on Ubuntu Lucid

[Brian Sutherland]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 02:36:18PM +0100, Julian Satchell wrote:
> I understand that you are the maintainers of the zope3 packages for
> Debian and Ubuntu. I hope you can help me with a question about the best
> way forward for using Zope3 on Lucid.
> 
> I am a developer of a production system that is currently running on
> Ubuntu 8.04, which uses Zope3 on one interface. We wish to update to a
> more recent LTS OS version, so that we can continue to support the
> customer for several more years. As this is a production system, we want
> to manage two conflicting priorities - changing the system as little as
> possible, while keeping it patched against newly discovered security
> issues. 

A very short history of what happened is that the last zope3 release was
very very old. The zope3 developers basically stopped developing "zope3"
as a single application and started developing the ZTK. The ZTK is a set
of libraries on which the zope3 was built.

"zope3" the application has recently been reincarnated as "bluebream".

The pkg-zope team basically stopped shipping zope3 as a monolithic
package and started shipping the parts of the ZTK that we felt were
stable enough at the time to be included in such a long-lived release as 
Debian.

The Ubuntu members of the pkg-zope team have started shipping much more
of the ZTK than is in Debian.

> Our code is relatively simple; we use page templates and the zope3 core,
> but don't use or need any of the ZMI features. 

Then you are probably a ZTK user rather than a "zope3" user. A very
simplistic way of thinking of the ZTK is: zope3 without the ZMI

> Whereas there was a well defined zope3 package on 8.04, the situation on
> 10.04 is more complex, and I have not been able to find which packages
> have the core; I have installed everything that seems relevant and
> nothing comes up with runzope or zopectl.

At the same time as zope3 transmuted into the ZTK, WSGI became famous
and widely used. It became easy to run a web application based on the
ZTK via WSGI.

We decided to not duplicate the work of others by providing a WSGI
server. There are already enough of them packaged in Debian/Ubuntu.

Four I can think of off the top of my head are:

    * Twisted
    * Paste
    * CherryPy
    * Apache and mod_wsgi

> Fairly extensive research on
> the web, and reading all the packaged documentation, has not shown a
> recommended package based configuration for using zope3 on 10.04.

At our company we use Puppet to configure Apache2 and mod_wsgi to run
our ZTK based application. We provide that application as a packaged
python module which depends on the parts of the ZTK we need.

> Is zope3 basically abandoned on 10.4?

The ZTK is most definitely not.

Zope3, which was built from the ZTK, is. At least until some volunteers
turn up who wish/need to package bluebream.

> Would I be better using
> easy_install (or similar) and maintaining my own tree?

There's no real consensus answer to this. I personally prefer the
Debian/Ubuntu packages.

There's also a group of people who maintain a list of ZTK
packages/versions that work well together:

    http://docs.zope.org/zopetoolkit/

Generally buildout (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zc.buildout) is used to
manage the installation.

Some, mostly larger companies, do prefer to maintain a list of
packages/versions versions themselves.

> I will do this if
> need be, but it increases the amount of maintenance and security work
> that we have to do, which I would obviously much rather have done by the
> professional team at Canonical.
> 
> If I have got the wrong mailing list, my apologies for wasting your
> time.

Nope, exactly the right list :)

> Dr. Julian Satchell
> 
> 
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-- 
Brian Sutherland