[Community] primagis.buildout

[Wyatt Baldwin]

> Hi
> 
> The recent Seattle Plone sprint really opened up my eyes as to how 
> cumbersome installing the full PrimaGIS stack can actually be.
> 
> I've been using Debian GNU/Linux as my main development and production 
> platform for a long time and it has kind of spoiled me by providing 
> almost all the dependencies as easily installable packages. So I never 
> actually experienced the difficulties in setting up a PrimaGIS instance.
> 
> After getting a new OSX machine for myself and talking with the people 
> at the sprint who were willing to make the effort to get PrimaGIS 
> installed I felt that we needed to improve the situation. Fortunately, I 
> caught Chris McDonough's talk about buildout systems at the Plone 
> conference and that got me inspired to implement such a system for 
> PrimaGIS also.
> 
> I chose to use Chris's own "buildit" system over others mainly because 
> it's written in Python and it has a simple and clean architecture making 
> it easy to understand, use and extend.
> 
> As a result, we now have a buildout system for PrimaGIS called 
> "primagis.buildout", which is available from the svn.gispython.org 
> repository.
> 
> primagis.buildout basicly automates the installation of all the
> components required to run PrimaGIS, starting from the Python
> interpreter itself and working up to Zope, Plone and PrimaGIS. It
> creates an isolated and repeatable sandbox so you can use it on your
> own systems without interfering any system-wide setups.
> 
> For more details on acquiring and using the buildout, please refer to
> 
>    http://trac.gispython.org/projects/PrimaGIS/wiki/PrimaGISBuildout
> 
> The buildout system works, in the sense that after running it you get a 
> working PrimaGIS installation with the demo map running on it. However, 
> the buildout contains lots of different components I we haven't been 
> able to test each of them extensively. This is where we'd like to have 
> your help!
> 
> Simply running the buildout on different systems and providing feedback 
> through the trac ticket system or this mailing list would be greatly 
> appreciated. Also, if you feel that the buildout should compile any of 
> the components with different arguments to ./configure or something 
> else, please feel free to let us know.
> 
> I'm hoping to make primagis.buildout the default way of installing 
> PrimaGIS for new users. Advanced users may either take the buildout 
> script and modify it to their needs or simply do everything manually.
> 
> In the future we could have different flavours that would handle PCL 
> only, provide the latest development versions of all components, etc.
> 
> 
> Looking forward to your feedback!

I've come across PrimaGIS a few times but never even tried to install
it. I'm not sure I even know exactly what it does, but I've been
interested in playing with it. This made it easy.

I'm running Ubuntu Dapper on an Intel Core Duo 1.67 Toshiba laptop. The
process took about 45 minutes from 'python build.py', though I was
using the network for a bunch of other stuff at the same time.

No issues to report. The build completed without a hitch. I just fired
up Zope and am poking around in the ZMI. I think this is actually the
hardest part for me--it's installed, now what? (I have almost no
experience with Zope and none at all with Plone.)

I may try this on a FreeBSD box and compare.

--
Wyatt Baldwin
byCycle.org