[Distutils] Packaging buildout-based project for release

[Travis Jensen]

Hi, all,

I'm hoping for some advice. I've got a Django web app that I've used 
buildout to build. It includes effectively three source trees (a Celery 
task tree, a set of re-usable Django database models, and the actual 
Django web application project. Yes, these could all be different repos, 
and if they should be, I will make them such, it just makes early 
development much easier. :)  Each of them has their own setup.py since 
they each have their own deployment story (celery tasks on worker 
systems, shared models just about anywhere, and the web app on the web 
tier). buildout's collective.recipe.template and collective.recipe.cmd 
are also being used to install node modules (lessc, coffeescript, and 
yuglify).

So, one option for deploying is "git clone myproj.git && cd myproj && 
buildout".  I'm not a fan for a variety of reasons: it is *slow*; it is 
not necessarily deterministic (even with version pinning on our own 
simple index, somebody could replace a file); and it requires additional 
software to be installed on production systems that I'd rather not be 
installed. An ideal world would solve all of them. but I could live with 
the (unlikely) non-determinism.

I'm really happy with the automation of the development environment that 
buildout gives. The question is whether I can take that and turn it into 
a deployable system or if I should be looking somewhere else.  An ideal 
world would be three RPMs (and a "meta"-RPM that installed all three) 
with all the Python and Node dependencies built in.

I have seen 
http://grok.zope.org/documentation/tutorial/introduction-to-zc.buildout/source-binary-and-rpm-experiments 
but, unfortunately, it is hard to follow without the various .cfg files 
(well, the entire source would probably be more helpful) it references. 
Is there a way to make this work, or should I just use a local buildout 
as a starting point to put together RPMs (not sure how to handle script 
with hard-coded paths; I suppose there is always sed :).

Finally, how does one get virtualenv and RPMs to play together? It 
isn't, strictly speaking, necessary, since I technically only need 
zc.buildout to be installed, and I could live with that in the system 
packages. I definitely don't want all of my dependencies installed in 
the system packaged, though!

Cheers.

tj