Improvements for instancemanager: quickreinstall support¶

I released the second version (0.2) of the instancemanager (see the first anouncement for a quick intro). The setup.py now also works with python 2.3, so if that bit you, you're clear now.

Most notable addition: it can quick-reinstall your products (optional). What can be reinstalled (so: not locked, not broken, not removed), is reinstalled.

What I'm finding to be very handy for testing migrations is that instancemanager tries to migrate your plone to a new version if it needs migration. This depends on you providing instancemanager with a copy of your Data.fs on which you want to try the migration. I'm moving my vanrees.org website from plone 2.1 to plone 2.5 and I'm already able to give it the old database, run instancemanager vanrees fresh to be greeted with a freshly setup Products/ directory and a fully migrated and quickisntall-updated site. Just one command!

The important point: this makes it way less time-consuming to test plone migrations, which means there will be more testing.

To get an idea, I'm giving my ~/.instancemanager/vanrees.py config file as an example:

 tgz_sources = [
     'DocFinderTab-0.5.2.tar.gz',
     'linguaplone.tgz',
     'plonelocalfolderng.tgz',
     'qplonecomments.tgz',
     'qplonegooglesitemaps.tgz',
     'redirectiontool.tgz',
     'Quills.tgz',
     ]

 tgz_basedir_template = '%(user_dir)s/svn/vanreesbundle/vanreesintegratie/products'

 tgzbundle_sources = [
     'reinoutproducts.tgz',
     ]

 tgzbundle_basedir_template = '%(user_dir)s/svn/vanreesbundle/vanreesintegratie/products'

 symlinkbundle_sources = [
     'vanreesbundle',
     'quillsbundle',
     'plone25',
     ]

 port = '9000'

 zope_version = '2.9.3'
 python = '/opt/local/bin/python2.4'
 user = 'reutel'
 password = 'kuch'

 plone_site_name = 'plone'
 main_products = ['vanrees',
                  'vanreestheme',
                  ]

I started to generate parts of a usage manual from the source code, just like I generated some archgenxml documentation from the sourcecode. I should automate this a bit more, uploading the documentation to plone.org takes way too much manual effort :-)