Packaging of Zope 2.12 in Debian

[Gael Le Mignot]

Hello,

The  company  I'm working  at  (Pilot  Systems)  is providing  hosting
services for Zope instances on  Debian servers.  First of all, I would
like  to  congratulates all  Debian  Developpers  for  the quality  of
Debian.

Most of  our customers are  using Plone 3  sites now, which  we deploy
using  Debian Lenny's Zope  2.10 packages.  But more  and more  of our
customers are using Plone 4, which requires Zope 2.12.

For now, we  deploy the Zope 2.12 on Debian  Squeeze, using the Python
packages from Squeeze  but then installing the Zope  and Plone through
buildout. We are  not really happy with this  method, which cause lots
of  duplication (we  have many  Zope  instances on  the same  server),
painful  security updates,  forces us  to install  build chain  on all
servers, ...

We would like to be able to do as we used to, that is, installing Zope
all   the   Python   libraries    from   Debian,   and   having   only
instance-specific produts  (including Plone,  at least on  first step)
installed on a per-instance basis.

For that, we would like to help packaging Zope 2.12 in Debian. With my
friend Arnaud Fontaine (who is  a Debian Developper), we did a primary
study  of all  the eggs  installed by  a vanilla  Zope 2.12  and their
status.

The full status can be found at [1]. On the 89 eggs in total :

- 15 eggs  are packaged in Squeeze  with the version  required by Zope
  2.12 ;

- 9 are packaged in Squeeze with more recent versions than Zope 2.12 ;

- 10 are packaged in Squeeze but with older versions ;

- 11  are not packaged  in Squeeze,  but packaged  in Ubuntu  with the
  version required ;

- 23 are packaged in Ubuntu with more recent versions ;

- 1 is packaged un Ubuntu with older version ;

- 20 are not packaged in neither Debian nor Ubuntu.

To have  a fully  working zope  2.12 package on  Debian, here  are the
steps that, according to us, should be done :

1. Adapt the Ubuntu packages to Debian.

2. Upgrade the versions of the packages that are too old.

3.  Check, one by one, for  the packages that are too recent in Debian
   or Ubuntu compared to Zope 2.12 if it is a problem or not.

4. Package the 20 missing eggs.

5. Make a meta-package that installs the eggs and adapts dzhandle so
   it can work with the new Zope packages.

Upload of  new packages will  of course go  to unstable, but  we would
like to have them in squeeze-backports too once they are ready.

Any comment on this plan ? Any  volunteer to help us ? Any idea on how
to handle the more recent packages,  if they conflict with the rest of
Zope 2.12 ?  And do you have any idea  what's Ubuntu maintainers plan,
and how we could coordinate efforts with them ?

[1] http://debian.pilotsystems.net/wip/zope-debian-status.ods

Regards,

-- 
Gaël Le Mignot - gael at pilotsystems.net
Pilot Systems - 9, rue Desargues - 75011 Paris
Tel : +33 1 44 53 05 55 - www.pilotsystems.net
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