[Erp5-dev] ERP5 Evaluation

Sat May 15 06:07:29 CEST 2004

Hi All,

Congratulations on open-sourcing ERP5, and good to see this mailing list
up!  I'm a UNIX data center architect with a past life in logistics
planning; I'm looking for Zope-based logistics packages for use in
managing data center resources for a 250-person Silicon Valley-based
company with several national data centers and a couple thousand hosts.  

I found ERP5 for the first time this week.  I of course was intrigued --
I think the ERP5 design is likely on target and flexible enough for what
we need, based on the articles I've found about it.

I wanted to try ERP5 first-hand, and spent the better part of a day (and
night) attempting to get it running.   I used Zope 2.7, Python 2.3.3,
CMF 1.4.3, and other package versions listed below.  Everything was
latest rev, except for CMFWiki, which I go into detail about below.  For
this evaluation I was using Debian Linux (on my laptop); for production
I would have needed to install on Solaris x86.

In the interests of an easy-to-evaluate ERP5, here's what I learned:

- I didn't know how incomplete INSTALL.txt was until I stumbled across
  http://www.en.erp5.org/workspaces/project/guide/ERP5Dependencies/view
  -- INSTALL.txt should probably just refer to the ERP5Dependencies
  page, so you don't have to maintain that information in two places.

- I didn't know how incomplete ERP5Dependencies was until I started
  realizing that some of the packages listed in ERP5Dependencies in turn
  have dependencies that aren't in standard python, Zope, or CMF.

- I didn't realize that ERP5Dependencies was missing critical version
  information until I was several hours into the process, when I started
  suspecting that ERP5 is not compatible with the latest version of many
  Zope products, or perhaps with Zope 2.7 itself...

- Overall, I got the impression that ERP5 is compatible with module
  versions that are are in some cases two years old.  

- So you probably want to add version numbers to each item listed in
  ERP5Dependencies -- what versions are you using?  I'd love to know.
  It might have made the difference between me being able to get it
  running or not.

- I was able to get most of the way there by repeatedly starting Zope
  and looking at the log to see what dependency was missing, adding the
  dependency, and retrying.  

- By the time a few hours had gone by I realized a great deal of what I
  was installing were things that were added to ERP5 in later
  iterations, and were likewise things that I wouldn't need myself in
  the near future, if ever.  I found myself wishing for a more modular
  ERP5 -- something that would allow me to just install a minimal core,
  then later add reporting, SyncML, psyco, and the like.  That might
  have made it more possible for me to complete the evaluation.

- I spent a great deal of time trying to build and install all of the
  PIL prerequisites, including tcl and tk, before I realized I
  apparently just needed to copy Imaging-1.1.4/PIL into lib/python.
  Maybe -- still not sure on this one.

- You probably want to maintain an ERP5-specific get_request patch
  instead of using iHotfix -- for one thing, I had to rename it to
  AiHotfix to get it to load early enough.  For another thing, I'm not
  sure that the latest version of iHotfix is compatible with ERP5, or
  maybe Localizer.  It was late at night by the time I came to that
  conclusion, so I don't remember now what the specifics were.   I do
  remember staring for a while at line 100 of iHotfix/__init__.py:

      # XXX What happens when Localizer 1.0 and iHotfix are installed??

- Because there is no tarball release schedule for CMFWiki, it being an
  unsupported product, I needed to get it from cvs.zope.org.  But about
  2 weeks ago Tres did a lot of refactoring which made CMFWiki
  incompatible with the most recent CMF tarball (1.4.3).  The symptom is
  an error importing a permissions module.  See
  http://cvs.zope.org/Products/CMFWiki/CMFWikiPermissions.py.diff?r1=1.1&r2=1.2
  I had to do a 'cvs co -D "April 1, 2004" CMF/CMFWIKI' to get a
  compatible version.

- CMFWiki, being an essentially dead product, really ought to be swapped
  out for ZWiki.  

- After satisfying all the dependencies I could find, a very long list
  (several hundred?) of the following sort of error spews into the log
  when starting Zope.  I spent a couple of hours trying to get rid of it
  before finally realizing that it eventually stops after a minute or
  so:

    2004-05-13T23:08:01 PROBLEM(100) Init Ambiguous name for method of
    Products.ERP5Type.Document.Variation.Variation: "setContributorsSet"
    != "_baseSetContributorsSet"

In the end, I was able to get Zope started, import demo.zexp and
images.zexp, but accessing /demo blows up with an AttributeError
(details below).  I didn't try to troubleshoot past this point, because
by this time I was already convinced that I just had the wrong version
of almost everything.

Overall, I'm still impressed.  I wish I could use ERP5 for this company,
but I need to demonstrate basic purchase order functionality by Monday
-- I'm going to need to spend the weekend building something simple on
top of a Zope accounting package I wrote last year.   I suspect that by
the time ERP5 is sorted well enough we'll already be entrenched with
whatever I provide next week.  I'll need to quickly add inventory,
planning, and other ERP-like features to my own code, and by the time
I've done that it will be difficult to back out of that route.  I've
learned a lot just seeing what your thoughts are on how to model ERP/MRP
objects, and am likely to incorporate much of that philosophy into what
we do regardless.

Again congratulations, and I look forward to seeing where ERP5 goes in
the future. 

Steve
-- 
Stephen G. Traugott  (KG6HDQ)
UNIX/Linux Infrastructure Architect, TerraLuna LLC
stevegt at TerraLuna.Org 
http://www.stevegt.com -- http://Infrastructures.Org 

Snapshot of my ./src directory as of this point in time:
--------------------------------------------------------

BTreeFolder2-1.0.tar.gz
CMF-1.4.3.tar.gz
CMFMailIn-1.0.0
CMFPhoto-1.2.3.tar.bz2
CMFReportTool-0.1.1.tgz
CPS-3.0.1.tar.gz
ERP5-cvs_root.tar.gz
Formulator-1.6.2.tgz
Imaging-1.1.4.tar.gz
Localizer-1.1.0a3.tgz
MySQL-python-0.9.2.tar.gz
Numeric-23.1.tar.gz
Photo-1.2.3.tgz
PyXML-0.8.3.tar.gz
Python-2.3.3.tar.bz2
Refresh-0.3.2.tar.gz
ReportLab_1_19.tgz
ZMySQLDA-2.0.8.tar.gz
ZWiki-0.30.0rc2.tgz
Zope-2.7.0.tgz
iHotfix-0.3.0.tgz
itools-0.3.0
itools-0.3.0.tgz
psyco-1.2-src.tar.gz
reportlab-1_19
tcl8.4.6-src.tar.gz
tk8.4.6-src.tar.gz

Details of the /demo AttributeError:
------------------------------------

Site Error

An error was encountered while publishing this resource.

AttributeError
Sorry, a site error occurred.

Traceback (innermost last):

    * Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 163, in publish_module_standard
    * Module Products.AiHotfix, line 83, in new_publish
    * Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 127, in publish
    * Module Zope.App.startup, line 203, in zpublisher_exception_hook
    * Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 100, in publish
    * Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
    * Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 40, in call_object
    * Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 306, in __call__
    * Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 343, in _bindAndExec
    * Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 191, in _exec
    * Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 124, in pt_render
    * Module Products.PageTemplates.PageTemplate, line 96, in pt_render
      <FSPageTemplate at /demo/index_html>
    * Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 189, in __call__
    * Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 233, in interpret
    * Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 663, in do_useMacro
    * Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 233, in interpret
    * Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 663, in do_useMacro
    * Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 233, in interpret
    * Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 463, in do_setGlobal_tal
    * Module Products.PageTemplates.TALES, line 220, in evaluate
      Line 50, Column 4
      Expression: <PythonExpr here.getOrderedGlobalActionList(global_actions)>
      Names:

{'container': <CMFSite instance at 43473d10>,
 'context': <CMFSite instance at 43473d10>,
 'default': <Products.PageTemplates.TALES.Default instance at 0x40a1158c>,
 'here': <CMFSite instance at 43473d10>,
 'loop': <SafeMapping instance at 447eb680>,
 'modules': <Products.PageTemplates.ZRPythonExpr._SecureModuleImporter instance at 0x40a1106c>,
 'nothing': None,
 'options': {'args': ()},
 'repeat': <SafeMapping instance at 447eb680>,
 'request': <HTTPRequest, URL=http://localhost:8080/demo/index_html>,
 'root': <Application instance at 4346e8f0>,
 'template': <FSPageTemplate at /demo/index_html>,
 'traverse_subpath': [],
 'user': stevegtm}

    * Module Products.PageTemplates.ZRPythonExpr, line 47, in __call__
      __traceback_info__: here.getOrderedGlobalActionList(global_actions)
    * Module Python expression "here.getOrderedGlobalActionList(global_actions)", line 1, in <expression>

AttributeError: getOrderedGlobalActionList (Also, an error occurred while attempting to render the standard error message.)

Troubleshooting Suggestions

    * The URL may be incorrect.
    * The parameters passed to this resource may be incorrect.
    * A resource that this resource relies on may be encountering an error.

For more detailed information about the error, please refer to error log.

If the error persists please contact the site maintainer. Thank you for your patience.