Zope 3.0, and why I won't use it

[Tim Peters]

[Max M]
>>> Where you on Windows or Linux?

[Steve Holden]
>> Windows.

[Max]
> I thought so :-)
> 
> I'm on Windows too, and Z3 the installer seems to be in a pretty sorrow
> state there.

The Z3 Windows installer is exactly what you get if you:

1. Unpack the Linux Z3 tarball.
2. Run "install.py bdist_wininst" from its root, on a Windows box
   with MSVC 6.0 installed.
3. Rename the installer that step generates to remove the blank
   from its name.

IOW, it's a 100% vanilla distutils-based installer, by way of Zope's
zpkg, and should be equivalent to what gets created on Linux.  If it's
not, that's a bug in distutils, or in zpkg, or in X3's zpkg config
files.

> I think it is pretty simple to get it running. But stuff like scripts
> being called "mkzopeinstane" instead of "mkzopeinstane.py"

That's a religious battle in distutils-land.  At least half of
Linux-heads seem to think it's offensive to God to leave an extension
on an "executable" script, and since most contributors to open
software are Linux-heads, .py gets stripped on most such files. 
There's no solution to this short of changing distutils to grow
platform-specific rules about retaining or stripping extensions.

> and there being references to folders that don't exists in the Windows
> install, so you need to guess which ones to use instead.

That's news to me.  The entire X3 test suite (both unit and functional
tests) passes on Windows, when run from a Zope instance created from
what the installer installs, and that accesses virtually every part of
X3.

If you have more details about that, the zope3-dev list would be a
better place to reveal them.