[Distutils] alternatives to zc.buildout?

[Martin Aspeli]

Tres Seaver wrote:
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> Chris Withers wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> What are the alternatives to zc.buildout?
>>
>> I'm wondering before I plough into zc.buildout because I'm guessing 
>> other big projects have run into the problem of pinning certain versions 
>> of eggs, building "instance homes" for projects, using a mixture of 
>> "public" eggs and those that are private and for a specific project, etc 
>> and otherwise working round limitations in setuptools...
> 
> The major competitor for mindshare is probably Ian Bicking's
> 'virtualenv':  it makes using 'easy_install' *really* easy, because you
> are working in a sandbox.
 >
> The standard installs for repoze.zope2, repoze.grok, repoze.plone, etc.
> all assume a virtualenv, and add scripts which turn the vanilla
> virtualenv into an "instance."

The problem I have with virtualenv - or rather, with raw setuptools 
based solutions - is that it's difficult to uninstall eggs. With 
buildout, once you remove the requirement/egg line and re-run buildout, 
the egg is no longer installed.

That said, I like virtualenv and use it a lot. I just think it solves a 
slightly different use case from the "repeatable configuration 
management system" one that buildout tries to solve.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book