Question

I want to develop a few products for a defined Plone install/version, which I cannot change (3.3.5).

What is the best way to organize my source tree, so that I do not have to put a huge plone instance into source control that won’t change anyway? I still want to use buildout for local checking, though…

What do you recommend?

I am on Windows and prefer git to hg, but can live with both…

Answer 1

Generally speaking, this is done now-a-days with mr.developer. You can use a buildout like this:

[buildout]
extends = 
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plock/pins/master/plone-4-3
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plock/pins/master/dev

And then add your sources to the auto-checkout parameter in the [buildout] section, and in the [sources] section, in the format described here:

• http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mr.developer

Something like:

[buildout]
auto-checkout = my.package

[sources]
my.package = git https://url.to/my.package

Then add your package to the eggs parameter of the plone.recipe.zope2instance section as usual:

[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
eggs =
    Pillow
    Plone
    my.package

See the Plone coredev buildout for a working example:

• https://github.com/plone/buildout.coredev

And don’t forget there is a develop parameter for the [buildout] section which allows you to specify the file system path to a “develop egg” (it does not perform a checkout though):

[buildout]
develop = src/my.package