Re: New GNOME Website - Plone Deployment

[Jeff Schroeder <jeffschroed gmail com>]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 9:12 AM, John Carr <john carr unrouted co uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Jeff Schroeder <jeffschroed gmail com> wrote:
>> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> We're working during this development cycle to have a beta version of
>>> the new GNOME website by September 21 (GNOME 2.28 release). For
>>> details about the plan, go to:
>>>
>>>  http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/TwoPointTwentyseven
>>>
>>> The new website will be based on Plone and we need to discussion about
>>> the best way to handle the deployment of the new website in GNOME
>>> servers. The Plone developers have added some deployment notes here:
>>>
>>>  http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/Plone/Deployment
>>
>> This page suggests we use varnish. Try googling "varnish segfault".
>> Personally, I've seen nothing problems with it. Do the plone devs have
>> suggested stable versions of it? It compiles the config file into
>> executable code and loads it. Could we use something novel like
>> Cherokee in its place
>
> My contacts say they use squid + pound over varnish.
>
>>> The short term goal now is to setup a continuous build infra to have a
>>> test website always running the latest code from repository. During
>>> the 2.27/2.28 cycle, the code will reside on Plone's collective
>>> subversion repository. So, the idea is to have 1 or 2 builds per day
>>> where the latest code is checked out from repository and automatically
>>> re-deployed on GNOME servers.
>>>
>>> The long term goal is, of course, to have our Plone instance running
>>> on GNOME servers with the ideal resources and optimum performance. In
>>> that case, I'm sure there are many technical details that need to be
>>> sorted out before any action here. This is why I'm sending this
>>> message: to kick off discussion between Plone developers and sysadmins
>>> about our Plone deployment.
>>>
>>> So, I ask to sysadmins:
>>> - Do we have enough server resources to run Plone with optimum
>>> performance? If not, how can we solve this?
>>> - How feasible it is to have the test website and the continuous build
>>> infra done in the next 2-3 weeks? In that case, we don't need the
>>> ideal server resources yet as it's just for testing.
>>> - Do you need any further information other than the stuff on the wiki page?
>>
>> Being new to the team, someone with more experience might be able to
>> answer some of the other questions but here are mine.
>>
>> Is python 2.4.5 a hard requirement? This limits where we can run Plone
>> and what distros we might use unless we backport python.
>
> Zope is funny about what version of python it targets. 2.4.4 is
> minimum. There is no 2.5 support.

Requiring a hand built python instance for a CMS makes me question
that CMS's ability to stay relevant, but I'm just the monkey in this
debate. From what I'm aware of, we mainly use RHEL and Ubuntu. My
suggestion would be we build strange packages like a 1off python with
--prefix set to /opt/${packagename}/$version. Then we can use the
alternatives system or plain old symlinks to update the version
systemwide. I do this at work with rpms and alternative's priorities
fwiw. I'll volunteer to build the packages for our RHEL5.x distros to
do this.

-- 
Jeff Schroeder

Don't drink and derive, alcohol and analysis don't mix.
http://www.digitalprognosis.com