The suggested upstream way to install plone, for example, is the unifiedinstaller. ZTK developers suggest the use of zc.buildout. Thesetools create an isolated environment where it is possible to develop and run your software with a very limited interactions with the rest of thesystem.
Buildout is really a development tool and not universally lauded as a deployment solution (though it's ubiquitous right now simply because it's the only thing that works). It suffers many reliability issues in both its design and its execution that make it unsuitable for our production environments, and it routinely confounds new users with the very build system concept, with its config syntax, and with its opaque modes of failure. Its goal of isolation from the base system is also both a strength and weakness: at some point, it either has to admit a dependency on system libraries (e.g. PIL) or else become a (less mature) package management system in its own right. By bundling zipped copies of the necessary packages and not exposing buildout's config file during installation, Steve McMahon has done an incredible job making the Unified Installer approachable and reliable for initial installs, but one is still left with raw buildout for updates and managing third-party add-ons.
For years, I've enjoyed and admired your packages as a refreshingly mature alternative. Leveraging Debian's superior QA and aptitude's fail-safety, they have been the most dependable solution for the unattended deployments that comprise WebLion's Plone hosting service. We will certainly miss your excellent work!
Zope 2 and Plone are obviously related, so the future of one of the twoinfluences the other one. The main problem for Zope2 is that the current stable upstream branch (2.12) still requires pthon2.4.
Actually not; it works in 2.5 and 2.6. 2.4 is unsupported by 2.12, though it "should work". http://docs.zope.org/zope2/releases/2.12/WHATSNEW.html#support-for-newer-python-versions
This is not acceptable in Debian and Ubuntu, and Zope 2 is right now the only stopper for the removal of python2.4 from both Debian and Ubuntu.Even worse, the current stable Plone releases requires Zope 2.10, which wesuppose will never support anything but python2.4 in the foreseeablefuture. The new major upstream branch (Plone 4) is still far from being released, which means that the only way to support Plone and Zope 2.x in Debian and Ubuntu is tokeep python2.4 in the distribution.
Were you aware that we've renumbered the releases and inserted a less ambitious Plone 4, which should be in beta by the end of the year? It will run on (and require) Zope 2.12. Plone is finally joining the modern Python world. :-)
Best, Erik