Comments on: Dude! Where’s My Python?

By: Python Packages via Easy Install for a Unified-Installer-built Plone « nihiliad

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:57:54 +0000

[...] great until you need to install an additional Python package for a Plone product. For which of your multiple Python versions will your installer build the package? This question would be frustrating enough even if there [...]

By: word

word — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:40:34 +0000

By: Matt Bowen

Matt Bowen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:53:30 +0000

Kudos identifying a really fundamental problem that’s way too easy to overlook once you get acclimated. What might be useful is trying to break the users into personas, or profiles of stereotypical users based on research, and then write to those personas. Then, assumptions such as which python the class of user might have can be standardized, as well as lots of other useful information about the users. For example, you have Azeen (the persona), who is an admin/integrator who is evaluating Plone for her company. She is interested in quick overviews and getting up to speed well, but it’s also important to get her on the path to a sane install and deeper knowledge. Then you have Thomas (the persona), who works with Plone every day as an integrator and need to be able to repeat deployments and maintain a heavily modified environment. If I’m writing for Azeen, I’m going to assume the unified installer (and its python), not and I’m going to write to get her playing more than get her background understanding (beyond what she’ll need to continue learning from the docs). If I’m writing for Thomas, he’s going to have a custom python install and (and maybe even a buildout), and is gong to be much more interested in “Why does that work.” Taking it out a level, for the community, if we all have profiles of Thomas and Azeen, with their backgrounds and motivations, we can share more assumptions. If we make the personas accessible to the public and relate docs to them because they are written for those personas, many users get entry points tailored to their use cases and goals.

By: Winn King

Winn King — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 03:29:22 +0000

I set up my development server with Fiesty and spent hours figuring out how to make Python 2.4 the default but once I got through that I was able to use buildout pretty easily with the help of Martin’s book. We do a lot of small sites and I’m starting to get up to speed, starting my 5th plone3 site and pretty happy overall and though I sometimes curse viewlets and such I really wouldn’t want to have to go back to Plone 2.5 even though I’ve still got miles to go to be able to do some things I could do easily in 2.5 and….I think it’s time for bed.

By: Jon Stahl

Jon Stahl — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:45:52 +0000

Martin-
It’s not so much that we should insist on standardization in the real world, just that we should make a consistent assumption in our documentation and examples.

By: Martin Aspeli

Martin Aspeli — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:48:50 +0000

This is a good point, though unfortunately a difficult one to standardise, unless we insist that people use an installer that builds a particular Python install. A lot of people won’t be using an installer, and many don’t like to build individual Pythons’ on space, speed and filesystem layout grounds.
One option may be to standardise on the use of a single system-wide but Plone-specific Python build (plython?), maybe through virtualenv.
Note that whilst buildout is immensely useful for developers, creating a buildout for “normal” site usage with “paster” is pretty simple – not really harder than using the Unified Installer – see http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/buildout. I think if we called it a “sandbox installer” or something like that, people wouldn’t be so afraid of it.

By: Gustavo

Gustavo — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:39:18 +0000

Jon,

I agree with you on this issue. I met some people who ran into problems because they had the wrong version of Python installed. I think creating a page about the different ways of installing Python or "upgrading" it is a good idea.

By: John Lenton

John Lenton — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:06:48 +0000

FYI, Feisty’s default python is 2.5.

By: Shaun Hills

Shaun Hills — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:09:23 +0000

Things get even wackier on Windows if you’re installing Plone from source into a vanilla install of Zope. Because there’s no such thing as a “system” Python in such cases; what you get is the Python interpreter that comes with that Zope installer. So you then need to go register it, install PIL and all the other dependencies, etc etc.

This is kind of an old-fashioned way of deploying Plone on Windows of course. Maybe there’s not a technical solution so much as an informational one – “The unified installer is the best practice way to install Plone on Windows”, “Here’s how to use your system Python on Windows” or whatever.

By: Anne Bowtell

Anne Bowtell — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:24:51 +0000

I agree, I’ve just been helping a couple of colleagues start out with Plone 3 (and as a result am trying to write some documentation). One thing I noticed was that they weren’t exactly sure where their Zope instances were, and my assumptions (based on my own installation) were wrong. When you start with Plone 3 its not just where’s my Python but where’s bits of my Plone (in lib/python now). Even buildout is scarey for a windows user – and again all the bits of Plone are not quite where you expected.
Plone 3 is of course brilliant which is why we care so much that the initial learning curve is steeper than it should be.