Zope 3.0, and why I won't use it

[Tim Peters]

[Tim Peters]
>> Ya, I sure agree it's not obvious what to do on Windows!  There have
>> been detailed Windows instructions since X3 alpha 1, but subsequent
>> release pages didn't point to them.  I see Jim updated the 3.0.0-final
>> release page to include them now:
>> 
<http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/ZopeX3300>

[Fred Pacquier]
> Huh, thanks for that pointer ! Sure makes a lot more sense that way, and a
> lot less to guess at, even for a developer release :)

Yup -- it's essential.

> If only the lower part of that page had figured in a prominent
> WINDOWS_INSTALL_README.TXT or some such in the Windows
> installer, there'd been much less bitchin' here :-)

Ah, but where would you put this file?  In a *tarball* distribution,
it's easy:  you stick README_FILES_WITH_SCREAMING_NAMES in the root of
the distribution, and then they're easy to find.

But this is a Windows *installer*, and every file it installs is
"hiding" under some subdirectory of your pre-existing Windows Python
installation.  Where could the X3 Windows installer put
WINDOWS_INSTALL_README.TXT where a new user is likely to find it?

I don't believe such a place exists.  It would be anti-social to
clutter the root of the Python installation with package README files,
and I doubt most users would think to look there anyway.  And that's
the "most obvious" place I can dream up.

Doing something other than that (for example, maybe popping up a
README file in Notepad at the end of installation) would require
changes to distutils, since X3's Windows installer is built by
distutils.  The point of that isn't that changing distutils makes it
impossible, the point is that since distutils *today* doesn't have
such abilities, no distutils-built installer built today (whether X3's
or any other Python project's) can do such things.