Packaging CPS

Packaging CPS is important for ease of installation. Unfortunately, it is also a great deal of effort, but an effort that can be distributed between the original software developers and third-party packagers.

The situation so far for CPS is that we have:

• the "big tarball", that installs itself on a fresh Zope 2.9 instance, made by the CPS dev. team.
• the Windows installer, which installs Python + Zope + CPS + additional librairies + additional software (converters), made by Ruslan.
• the Debian/Ubuntu packages, made by the Debian Zope Packaging Team, and specially Fabio Tranchitella
• Gerardo Puerta has made an ebuild for Gentoo.

There are some areas were would benefit from some external help, though:

• We are still working on the Mac OS X installer, for which some preliminary code has been written, but I have been told that the current approach is a dead-end and we need to start afresh with a new approach.
• There are still not satisfactory RPM packages for common distributions like Fedora, Mandriva or OpenSuse.

Packaging Zope and Zope applications under Linux is challenging, because you have to accomodate both people who just want "one click install" (using apt-get / yum / urpmi), but also provide the basis for rock-solid, possibly multi-instances, Zope server management (including easy instance creation / deletion, log rotation, service initialisations, etc.) without compromising security. The Debian Zope team seems to have done a lot of work to streamline this process for Zope.

Regarding CPS, any help in improving the existing packages, or in making new packages kinds available, would be really appreciated. If you feel in a packaging mood, join the cps-devel mailing list and let's start working together.