[triangle-zpug] Plone Jams

[Chris Calloway]

Josh Johnson wrote:
 > I sat in on a demo that Whit did of workingenv (I
 > remember him calling it that, not sure about the workingenv/virtualenv
 > difference), but have never used it. I use VMs to segment my python
 > environments right now.

OK, if you are using workingenv or virtual python, you should
immediately go look at the replacement product virtualenv. virtualenv is
the package that is going to have support going forward.

virtualenv is a successor to workingenv, and an extension of
virtual-python, written by Ian Bicking with support from The Open
Planning Project:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv
http://blog.ianbicking.org/2007/09/16/2-python-environment-experiments/

It's super easy. Like 3 lines or less of magic...

Pick the python you want to use. It would be good to start with a fresh
compile from scratch so that you are using a python with nothing already
installed in site-packages. Remember, python 2.4 is still the
requirement for Zope3 (you will get compile errors immediately if you
try to use 2.5 unless you are a C guru) and 2.4 does not come with
easy_install (the setuptools binary for installing eggs).

1) If you don't already have easy_install, download ez_setup.py and run it:

wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
python ez_setup.py

This makes an easy_install binary in the bin of your python.

2) Then use easy_install to get and install virtualenv. Use the
subversion repo trunk to get virtualenv so you get the lastest code
which copies the include directory to the new virtual environment so you
can build C extensions (see my comment in Ian's blog post above and his
response):

easy_install virtualenv==dev

This make a virtualenv binary in the bin of your python.

3) Then create as many virtual environments as you want like this:

virtualenv myvirtualenv
cd myvirtualenv
./bin/python
 >>> (you are now in a virtual python environment
      where you can install any eggs you want and
      not pollute your build of python for other
      projects.)

I use virtualenv to make environments for zc.buildout as BaijuM describes:

http://www.muthukadan.net/docs/zca.html

Also check out Baiju's screencast for using virtualenv with zopeproject:

http://www.baijum.info/z3/screencasts/zopeproject.html

Baiju has the blog which is probably best attuned to the general geist
of where this user group's collective head is at:

http://baijum81.livejournal.com/

-- 
Sincerely,

Chris Calloway
http://www.seacoos.org
office: 332 Chapman Hall   phone: (919) 962-4323
mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599