Jim Fulton released zc.buildout
1.0.0b30 last night. This release is worth mentioning for two
reasons:
buildout can now be told to prefer final versions over alpha/beta/dev
releases. In normal mode, buildout will simply try to get the newest
version of a package that matches the package requirements (just like
easy_install). This means, however, that development releases may be
installed instead of stable final releases, which usually is undesired in
production environments. To get buidout to prefer final releases, put the following
statement in your buildout.cfg:
[buildout]
prefer-final = true
buildout now uses PyPI's simple
package index by default. To setuptools (and zc.buildout), this index
looks like the regular PyPI, except that it's much speedier (because it
doesn't have to render fancy HTML) and it lists all releases of a
certain package, even the hidden ones. A while back, Jim had already played
with a simple index like that, dubbed ppix, which uses PyPI's XML-RPC
API to mirror the information.
I've done a little test and timed updating the grok buildout with buildout -n using the
various indexes (standard PyPI, simple PyPI, ppix). Buildout had to go to
whichever index I configured and check for newer versions of roughly 100
eggs (times are in minutes and seconds):
So, ppix is only marginally faster than simple PyPI (depending on how
"close" you are to either one), but they're both quite a lot faster than the
standard PyPI.
