launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Gary Poster <gary.poster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 27, 2009, at 4:41 PM, Aaron Bentley wrote:

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> Max Bowsher wrote:
>> Aaron Bentley wrote:
>>> Better yet, why not take proper advantage of our VCS?  If we stored

...

>>> We could even extract the tarballs-- AIUI directories are
>>> acceptable eggs.
>> 
>> Do you mean "acceptable sourcedists to use to build eggs"?
> 
> Well, I actually meant they were acceptable eggs-- all the contents of
> my eggs subdir are directories with names like
> zope.principalannotation-3.6.0-py2.5.egg, and I assumed we could just
> reuse directories like that, because it's worked with ez_install for me.
> Today's experimentation shows buildout is a lot less directory-friendly
> than I was hoping.

You can do that kind of thing with develop eggs.

Talking with Michael, the concerns about the current approach are theoretical for now, with real concerns for the future: should a new developer have to download the whole branch, with all of its history, in order to build launchpad?  As we get more and more in our branch, it will be a bigger and bigger problem.

Some of what you guys have discovered is a lot of work.  Other arguments are to drop using released packages.  I'm not in favor of this.

I think the right answer for this is the one that is usually followed for buildout development: keep a distribution repository that buildout points to for download.  That way developers only download what they need.  The challenge for us is how to get that to work for our deployment.  There a number of answers for this.  Some of the options could be quite easy for us.

I'll do some experiments later and come up with my proposal.

Gary