something about buildout

[Sasha Hart]

This was mentioned to me at PyTexas.

buildout (PyPI: zc.buildout) is something that has existed a long while, which some people have used instead of virtualenv. It is a predecessor and probably in some respects an ancestor of virtualenv. Where virtualenv is just an a la carte, consenting-adults mechanism for isolating python deps to encourage reproducibility, buildout has a broader scope: it's intended a build tool for building whole applications, with a focus on encouraging reproducibility of environments, and fitting somewhere between (e.g.) make and puppet. It uses eggs. It's more about whole workflow than providing just one little piece, as virtualenv does.

I don't have much prior knowledge of buildout's mechanisms. Further, at initial inspection I find the buildout documentation to be relatively challenging. I don't actually even know whether someone hasn't built some buildout extension or workflow which would make vex-like functionality pointless for diehard buildout users.

I suspect given its vintage and emphasis on eggs that buildout is different enough from virtualenv in the concrete specifics that it would be a huge mess to try to include buildout support in vex itself. However, if there is interest I think it could be possible to develop a similar utility to vex, with approximately the same interface, and have that reuse common code from vex-the-package.

[Sasha Hart]

I don't think there is enough shared stuff to make this interesting, buildout seems to me to be exactly what its users want already