[Distutils] Improved error handling in zc.buildout

[Martin Aspeli]

Jim Fulton wrote:
> A major annoyance in zc.buildout has been its poor error handling.   
> Generally, when an error occurred, a a traceback would be printed  
> giving little or no clue about what went wrong or what was going on.   
> Previously, I was focussed on important features.  The latest release  
> focusses on better error reporting and debugging support.  I'd like  
> to continue to provide some emphasis on this, so feedback would be  
> especially appreciated now that I think I've improved error handling  
> quite a bit.

That's great news, Jim!

I had a particular problem before, where the "Plone" egg (which includes 
all the Products.* packages that make up plone, and all the other proper 
eggs as dependencies) would try to compile .py files in filesystem skin 
folders (i.e. Zope Script (Python)'s) and get compile errors (return 
outside function, for example). With workingenv and easy_install, it'd 
report the errors but not stop; buildout seems to stop. Better error 
handling would hopefully help diagnose this. We couldn't find a way to 
stop setuptools from trying to compile those files, or a way to get 
buildout to ignore the errors.

Martin