After the great Plone Conference 2009 that was held from wednesday to friday we are now sprinting two more days. I guess there’s more than 200 people sprinting on saturday and sunday, improving Plone in all area’s: documentation, code, add-ons, you name it.

I gave up on getting plone 4.0 coredev running on my mac a few months ago after five minutes when something started to complain, but with all the gread minds around me in Budapest and a slide show by Maurits I wanted to get it running now. But it’s still painfull for some reason and I have I have no clue why it works for everybody else but not for me. Anyway, here are the roadblocks I bumped into installing it on OS X Leopard 10.5 .

Python 2.6

You need python 2.6 to run Plone 4.  OS X leopard comes default with an older python 10.5. For doing my Plone 3.X projects I use the python2.4 from macports, which works great, but macports for Leopard doesn’t have a python 2.6 package. Snow Leopard raised the bar by including support for both 32bit and 64bit in python, and causing a lot of pain to build other python versions from source, because they might link to the wrong 32bit or 64bit support libraries.

Florian Schulze created a buildout builds python 2.4/2.5 and 2.6 for you, paying attention to all the dependencies. It’s major goal was to simplify install on Snow Leopard but it works on Leopard 10.5 as well. Or: it should, because it doesn’t for me, it stops when trying to compile python 2.4. Solution: remove all references to python 2.4 and 2.5 from the buildout.cfg : you only need python 2.6 for Plone 4 and the other versions are already there from macports or the system python.  Hurdle one taken, I have a python 2.6.

Distribute madness

After fetching the Plone 4 development branch from http://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/buildouts/plone-coredev/branches/4.0 ,  doing a python2.6 bootstrap.py and running bin/buildout, the buildout coun’t install mr.developer.

Now what. For some reason the included Distribute version was still stuck at 0.6.3, when 0.6.6. is the most recent version. So I created a python  2.6 virtualenv from my pythons 2.6 buildout (virtualenv-2.6 is created in the bin folder there) and installed  0.6.6 by using the easy_install from the newly created virtualenv. By the way, distribute is the succesor to the setuptools package.

After having a virutalenv with up to date distribute I used it to bootstrap my Plone 4 coredev buildout again and run bin/buildout. jay!

mr.developer is drunk

Buildout finished with a report that mr.developer couldn’t find some sources. You can list them by running bin/develop status, they have exclamation marks before them.  In particular, Products.CMFQuickInstaller and Products.PlacelessTranslationService were not installed by mr.developer in the src/ subfolder. I checked paths, checked with other sprinters, did an svn update, reran bin/buildout, nothing.  In the end I just did a manual svn checkout of the two packages with the links provided in the sources.cfg from the Plone4 core-dev in the src folder.

Swallow the blue PILl

bin/instance fg to start Plone 4 and…… we have no PIL module. Ah, right, I created a virtualenv without site-packages for the python2.6 to install Distribute. Been there, done that. There’s an easy way to add the Python Imaging (alias PIL) to your virtualenv by running easy_install http://dist.plone.org/thirdparty/PILwoTk-1.1.6.4.tar.gz .

And we’re up and running with a Plone 4 test buildout on OS X Leopard 10.5 . Finally.

Update 1

Apparently I had a serious headache or my macports was messed up when I search for Python 2.6 in macports two weeks ago. Alec Mitchell points out it has been there for a long time, just search for with port search  python26. After installing python 2.6 with sudo port install python26 and not forgetting to install py26-pil as well, all of the above mentionned problems with distribute and mr.developer are gone. Pfew.