Cool, my proposal for OSCON 2008 has been accepted, and will be about Plone 3, zc.buildout and the work on creating private PyPI servers using PloneSoftwareCenter.

It will present how we work at Ingeniweb with both public and private packages, to deliver Plone applications to customers, using eggs and buildout.

It's funny because since a few days, there are a lot of discussions around distutils, PyPI and setuptools, and about making things better at Python level on how to distribute packages and applications. So it seems to be a hot topic.

From my point of view, PyPI brought a lot in the past years in this area, and being able to deploy a pypi-compatible software center in a company helps a lot in using the same set of command line tool. (distutils/setuptools)

So, I am pretty happy nowadays with zc.buildout and setuptools (thanks to Mr Fulton, Eby and al), despite all the critical that has been made about setuptools in the last few days, and despite the fact that it is *so hard* to make a tiny little change make it to distutils trunk :'( ...

Anyways, if you do Plone or Zope dev, and if you are interested about software delivery, I'd be glad to exchange about it, to see how you work and deliver Zope apps, to get other point of views before OSCON.

Here's the abstract of my talk:
Software delivery for complex systems in Python/Zope used to be a little bit homemade: people usually used custom scripts to deploy their systems, or relied on generic installation tools. For Plone applications, most of the time a complex installation guide was provided to the customer, with a list of dependencies to install and system changes to take care of.

The Python Package Index (PyPI), formerly the Cheeseshop, brought a few years ago a new way to distribute Python applications, together with setuptools. It made it possible to install a Python library the same way package systems like apt or yum does. From there people started to deliver their software in separated components, called eggs. Since most applications in Plone are now egg-based, it is possible to install a software with a list of eggs.

zc.buildout provides a descriptive language to list all eggs needed for a software to run and a plugin system that allows to customize each steps.This talk will present a case study of a Plone application life cycle:

• environment building - creating the buildout and its recipes
• continuous integration with buildbot – running the buildout on target systems
• deploying – preparing and packaging the buildout for an offline installation
• updating – preparing and releasing an update

And will present a set of extra tool we have built on the top of zc.buildout to standardize our projects developments and help the developers:
- a set of templates to start a buildout-based project in subversion - a tool to create buildbot slaves automatically, given a buildout - a diff tool to ease the upgrade of a buildout that is in production.