Enhancing the Debian/Ubuntu Zope infrastructure

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Heya,

while packaging Zenoss I found that dzhandle/dh_installzope{,instance}
are missing two features. Both ideas were discussed by Fabio
Tranchitella and me, and we both find them very useful.

  - Support for mkzopeinstance.py's --skelsrc option. This allows to
provide a skeleton dir, which is different from the default skeleton.
Useful to install additional config files into the instance's etc
directory, for example. I've committed a preliminary implementation of
this to zope-debhelper and zope-common and it works fine so far (using
"Skeleton: /some/dir" in dzinstance).

  - Support for adding a default Zeo instance as / database while
installing an instance the first time (or reinstalling after a purge).
That's a bit more complicated to do, but not impossible. Please note
that adding a Zeo instance can only be done in a sane way on the first
install. Having one Zeo instance on the / mount point is a common use
case and should be supported if a Zope instance needs it. If the admin
wants to add more/other Zeo instances, he can do as he like - dzhandle
won't mess with it. That's the way we think it should work:
    * Define a default port for the Zeo instance in dzinstance
    * While installing the admin is asked to specify the Zeo's port
(like it is done with the Zope instance). The Zeo instance is created.
    * dzhandle will now take the skeleton, copy it into a temporary
directory and replace the <zodb_db main> entry by a valid entry for the
Zeo instance which we have just created.
    * The zope instance is installed using the modified skeleton.


All inputs and opinions are very appreciated. If there are no major
objections I will finish the implementation of these two additions.


Best regards,

Bernd

-- 
Bernd Zeimetz
<bernd at bzed.de>                         <http://bzed.de/>