[PEAK] Newbie PEAK Questions - Answers appreciated

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:02 AM 8/7/2005 -0400, Krys Wilken wrote:
>Hi.
>
>I want to use PEAK for my next project.  It seems really interesting.
>The web site seems a bit dated, however.
>
>I see that there is still activity in this mailing list and in the
>CVS/SVN repository.
>
>My questions are:
>
>What's the best way to get a stable version of PEAK?  Is SVN the
>preferred method?

Yes.  You can also use EasyInstall 
(http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall) to download snapshots 
using the

      --find-links=http://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots

option to tell it to look there for downloads.


>Also, what is the best way to find out what is new an exciting in PEAK
>since the docs were last updated?

The CHANGES.txt file 
(http://svn.eby-sarna.com/PEAK/CHANGES.txt?view=markup) or its revision log 
(http://svn.eby-sarna.com/PEAK/CHANGES.txt?view=log) are the best way.


>I guess that because the web site seem un/under-maintained that I am
>just concerned about how active this project is and how to best get
>started.

I'm no longer in the "enterprise computing" business personally, so there's 
not as much overlap between my job and my open source work with PEAK 
anymore.  This means I've had a lot less time available for it this 
year.  Most of my open source work in recent months has focused on Python 
Eggs, setuptools, and EasyInstall:

     http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall
     http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools
     http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs

These projects will probably have a much bigger impact on the overall world 
of open source and "enterprise" Python than PEAK has had to date.  They 
will also allow PEAK to be broken down into lots of smaller packages that 
are more likely to get used.  I've been finding that the task of 
documenting (and understanding) smaller packages is much easier than trying 
to document part of a very large system.  Also, people are more willing to 
commit to learning a small tool that's specifically focused on a single 
issue they have, rather than invest in a huge-looking framework they don't 
know much about.

So, the future of PEAK is that its current functionality will be broken 
into small pieces individually available from PyPI, and individually 
documented.  For a couple of examples of what individual pieces and their 
documentation might look like, see:

     http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/SecurityRules
     http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/OptionsHowTo