Further Plone3 experiences: buildout

I always used to start a new Plone project by downloading the Plone release that was required for the project, finding the correct Zope, possibly upgrading python, and installing all other third party dependencies (though most of the stuff is in the Plone release usually).

This time I decided to do it the new and improved way, as documented in Martin Aspelli's "Professional Plone Development" book, using buildout.

So, I followed the steps: I already had easy_install, I created the plone3_buildout project, bootstrapped it and strarted ./bin/buildout

Then I got stuck:

$ ./bin/buildout -vvvvvvvvvvvv 
Installing 'zc.buildout', 'setuptools'.
While:
  Installing.
  Checking for upgrades.
  Getting distribution for 'zc.buildout'.
Error: Download error: (60, 'Operation timed out')

(Lots of -v options in an attempt to get a bit more verboseness about what's actually timing out, but no luck)

So, buildout depends on a number of repositories with no fallback at all. Furthermore, there's no direct way of figuring out which source/egg repository is acutally down. You would guess that if zc.buildout is failing, the problem is at zope.org, but it turns out that effbot.org is actually down.

So now what? Everyone trying to start a new buildout at this moment is stuck. Wait until effbot.org comes up again? Dive into buildout internals to figure out a way to work around it? So much for productivity improvement...

If you already have some buildouts you're in luck - you may be able to have buildout use your cache. For me, the only option to get started right now is to do the tradition Zope/Plone download, build, install dance. At least a proven method that works and let's you know why, when and where it's failing.

So, this was my first stab at really using buildout, and as you can guess, I'm not impressed. As long as buildout depends on multiple points of failure and it's not more verbose at what's going wrong, it's not mature enough for real Professional Plone Development.