[Erp5-dev] ERP5 Evaluation

[Sebastien Robin]

Hi Steve,

First, thank you about your interest on ERP5.
I'm sorry that you spent so many times on the installation of ERP5. For 
sure it is really hard to do it by hand, and it is probably a nightmare.


> - 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.

This is a great idea.

>
> - 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...

ERP5 is dependant on many products. That's why we have created many RPMS 
for Mandrake GNU/Linux. May be you prefer Debian, but if you want to try 
ERP5, the best way is to install Mandrake on one box (it takes only a few 
minutes) and then install ERP5 (our packages are on contrib sources of 
Mandrake). May be one day someone will do packages for Debian, but it is 
not the case actually.
ERP5 is Zope 2.7 compatible, but for some products, we use old version, 
and for some others we use old version changed by us, so the best way is 
to use our RPMS. By the way, you will be able to find all our versions 
thanks to rpm.

>
>
> - 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.

This would be great. I would like at least to decrease the number of 
dependencies for ERP5, but I have more important things to do actually.

>
> - 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.

I don't know for debian. On Mandrake we use python-imaging.

>
> - 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

You should use the tarball stored inside the rpm. We use CMF 1.4.2 without 
any patch.

For all problems of install, the only way actually is to use Mandrake 
10.0.


Best regards.

  Sebastien.

>  
> 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

-- 
Sebastien ROBIN

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