[loggerhead/MERGE] Switch Loggerhead from KID to ZPT template engine

[Robert Collins]

On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 11:30 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
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> Martin Albisetti wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Aaron Bentley <aaron at aaronbentley.com> wrote:
> >>> The short answer is yes.
> >>> It requires an extra dependency, and it's currently only packaged for
> >>> python 2.4 in Hardy, so it forces us to stick with python 2.4.
> >> What package?  I'm having trouble finding it on my Hardy despite having
> >> Launchpad installed there.
> >>
> >> Does zope provide the templating as a separate piece, or are we dragging
> >> most of zope in as a dependency?
> > 
> > We seem to be dragging in Zope as a dependency.
> 
> Considering how much people kick and scream about TurboGears and its
> dependencies, it doesn't seem advisable to depend on Zope as well.

Argh yes I completely agree. I don't fancy my chances of getting zope
happy on freebsd *as well*.


> >> I can see *supporting* zpt as a tradeoff.  At this point I'm not certain
> >> we should be ditching kid at the same time.  At least, not in Loggerhead
> >> trunk.
> > 
> > Code is a mess as-is, not sure that allowing to choose templating
> > engines will help in that area.
> 
> I am concerned about being a good neighbour.  I don't want to repeat
> what happened with cscvs, where Canonical took an open-source project
> and made newer versions proprietary (eventually open-sourcing it again).

I don't think Canonical did anything wrong with cscvs on the code
management side - what we did (using a GPL product internally,
enchancing it as we did, and eventually releasing those changes) is
completely consistent with both the spirit and letter of the GPL. The
GPL is designed to people to make their own changes, as long as they
don't distribute a copy that other people cannot similarly change.

It can be argued that we might have done more to contribute to 'the
community' of cscvs developers at the same time. But there were
seriously dysfunctional behaviours happening in the Arch community,
where cscvs has its roots at that time, and *they* broke apart the
community development efforts of cscvs at the time.

There is no chance of that happening here in my opinion, the two
communities are really uncomparable! 

> I'm fine if we want to branch loggerhead and make a loggerhead-tal
> branch, until we settle on a permanent strategy.

I think this makes sense, if the maintenance burden isn't too high. If
it is going to be very high, as a user, I'd rather see the developers
focus on making it good with just one engine, and I'll just file bug
reports on the headaches I encounter installing it.

> I'll look into a few more templating engines, and see if I can come up
> > with something better.
> 
> Cool.  I'm not specifically objecting to zpt, though.  Just trying to
> ensure that our strategy keeps Loggerhead accessible to non-Launchpad users.

I wonder if it would make sense to have a 'check deps' script of some
sort which can run, import everything needed individually (e.g. TG,
alchemy, etc) and report on them.

I imagine it might output something like:
Checking TG...Error
Checking ZPT..Ok
Errors found, check foo.log for details.

I would certainly have found this helpful when trying to figure out what
mysterious things were missing/present for loggerhead and bundle buggy.

-Rob
-- 
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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