[RFC] depend on testtools for testing?

[Francis J. Lacoste]

On October 29, 2009, Robert Collins wrote:
> I've been mulling on this sort of thing for a while; I'm coming to the
> conclusion that buildout - like config-manager, which is its moral
> equivalent but using VCS rather than eggs - is an adaptation that should
> be avoided. Its better to build a deb of the needed dependency and
> install it.
> 
> Then when you have conflicting library requirements there are a number
> of ways to address it:
>  - use a chroot
>  - fix the project to use a newer library version
>  - fix the packaging to support older libraries being coinstalled (which
> eggs can support I believe, but the python packaging rules on Ubuntu
> don't [yet]). The C library rules do support multiple sonames being
> installed, so there is prior art on what the packaging system needs to
> see.
> 
> Using packages is desirable because it leverages the [significant]
> investment made in producting things on Ubuntu rather than creating a
> new environment with its own [significant - I've been watching :)]
> quirks.
> 

Ok, I know I shouldn't go more off-topic than we are already, but I think this 
is a useful conversation to have someday. I'll just say that your perspective 
is also shared with UbuntuOne and ISD, but that Launchpad (and Landscape) to a 
certain extent are sitting on the other side of the fence here. 

We prefer to manage the quirks of buildout than to have our version management 
be slowed down by the additional effort required to maintain .deb (and 
especially the impact on deployment - involving IS every time we want to land 
a change updating dependency was a real pain.) We have quirks now, but at 
least we own our dependency stack.

Gary has an extensive document on this that was discussed on the software arch 
cop. It goes into great details on the advantages and inconvenient of using 
.deb vs buildout for development and deployment. He wanted to make it public, 
so it might be a good time to poke him about it.

Cheers


-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis.lacoste at canonical.com
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