[PEAK] The breakup begins; egg snapshots now available

[Phillip J. Eby]

I've actually begun the breakup of PEAK packages, and it's going amazingly 
fast so far.  The current Subversion HEAD of PEAK uses setuptools to find 
and obtain all its dependencies.  I've created a new snapshots directory 
for development snapshots of packages under development:

     http://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots/

If you want to obtain development snapshots of these projects, you can do 
so using the EasyInstall program (see 
http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall for installation 
instructions).  The command to install the latest PEAK and its dependencies is:

     easy_install.py -fhttp://peak.telecommunity.com/snapshots/ PEAK

It is imperative, by the way, that you clean out old versions of ZConfig, 
fcgiapp, wsgiref, or pretty much any other packages even remotely 
associated with PEAK.  Such packages will take precedence over packages 
installed by EasyInstall, so you must remove them, or you'll get strange 
problems caused by importing old versions of things.

Anyway, the breakup has begun, and it's pretty exciting.  The win32 .egg 
files for PEAK dropped from 2.1M to 1.7M when I removed all the external 
stuff (kjbuckets, ZConfig, PyProtocols,fcgiapp, and wsgiref).

I expect that there will probably still be a few hitches here and 
there.  For example, I haven't yet updated PEAK to use pkg_resources to 
access pkgfile: targets, and peak.web doesn't know how to listdir() 
package-based resources, either.  These may require changes to a couple of 
interfaces.  Overall, though, things are going nicely.  I hope to have some 
better setuptools documentation out this weekend; for now you can see an 
extremely partial draft at:

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

I hope to have most of the Developer's Guide and all of the Command 
Reference stuff documented this weekend, along with a setuptools-0.5a9 
release that will hopefully wrap up the remaining features needed for PEAK 
to run as an egg.