Discussion:
[Erp5-dev] ERP5 Evaluation
Steve Traugott
2004-05-15 04:07:29 UTC
Permalink
Hi All,

Congratulations on open-sourcing ERP5, and good to see this mailing list
up! I'm a UNIX data center architect with a past life in logistics
planning; I'm looking for Zope-based logistics packages for use in
managing data center resources for a 250-person Silicon Valley-based
company with several national data centers and a couple thousand hosts.

I found ERP5 for the first time this week. I of course was intrigued --
I think the ERP5 design is likely on target and flexible enough for what
we need, based on the articles I've found about it.

I wanted to try ERP5 first-hand, and spent the better part of a day (and
night) attempting to get it running. I used Zope 2.7, Python 2.3.3,
CMF 1.4.3, and other package versions listed below. Everything was
latest rev, except for CMFWiki, which I go into detail about below. For
this evaluation I was using Debian Linux (on my laptop); for production
I would have needed to install on Solaris x86.

In the interests of an easy-to-evaluate ERP5, here's what I learned:

- I didn't know how incomplete INSTALL.txt was until I stumbled across
http://www.en.erp5.org/workspaces/project/guide/ERP5Dependencies/view
-- INSTALL.txt should probably just refer to the ERP5Dependencies
page, so you don't have to maintain that information in two places.

- I didn't know how incomplete ERP5Dependencies was until I started
realizing that some of the packages listed in ERP5Dependencies in turn
have dependencies that aren't in standard python, Zope, or CMF.

- I didn't realize that ERP5Dependencies was missing critical version
information until I was several hours into the process, when I started
suspecting that ERP5 is not compatible with the latest version of many
Zope products, or perhaps with Zope 2.7 itself...

- Overall, I got the impression that ERP5 is compatible with module
versions that are are in some cases two years old.

- So you probably want to add version numbers to each item listed in
ERP5Dependencies -- what versions are you using? I'd love to know.
It might have made the difference between me being able to get it
running or not.

- I was able to get most of the way there by repeatedly starting Zope
and looking at the log to see what dependency was missing, adding the
dependency, and retrying.

- By the time a few hours had gone by I realized a great deal of what I
was installing were things that were added to ERP5 in later
iterations, and were likewise things that I wouldn't need myself in
the near future, if ever. I found myself wishing for a more modular
ERP5 -- something that would allow me to just install a minimal core,
then later add reporting, SyncML, psyco, and the like. That might
have made it more possible for me to complete the evaluation.

- I spent a great deal of time trying to build and install all of the
PIL prerequisites, including tcl and tk, before I realized I
apparently just needed to copy Imaging-1.1.4/PIL into lib/python.
Maybe -- still not sure on this one.

- You probably want to maintain an ERP5-specific get_request patch
instead of using iHotfix -- for one thing, I had to rename it to
AiHotfix to get it to load early enough. For another thing, I'm not
sure that the latest version of iHotfix is compatible with ERP5, or
maybe Localizer. It was late at night by the time I came to that
conclusion, so I don't remember now what the specifics were. I do
remember staring for a while at line 100 of iHotfix/__init__.py:

# XXX What happens when Localizer 1.0 and iHotfix are installed??

- Because there is no tarball release schedule for CMFWiki, it being an
unsupported product, I needed to get it from cvs.zope.org. But about
2 weeks ago Tres did a lot of refactoring which made CMFWiki
incompatible with the most recent CMF tarball (1.4.3). The symptom is
an error importing a permissions module. See
http://cvs.zope.org/Products/CMFWiki/CMFWikiPermissions.py.diff?r1=1.1&r2=1.2
I had to do a 'cvs co -D "April 1, 2004" CMF/CMFWIKI' to get a
compatible version.

- CMFWiki, being an essentially dead product, really ought to be swapped
out for ZWiki.

- After satisfying all the dependencies I could find, a very long list
(several hundred?) of the following sort of error spews into the log
when starting Zope. I spent a couple of hours trying to get rid of it
before finally realizing that it eventually stops after a minute or
so:

2004-05-13T23:08:01 PROBLEM(100) Init Ambiguous name for method of
Products.ERP5Type.Document.Variation.Variation: "setContributorsSet"
!= "_baseSetContributorsSet"

In the end, I was able to get Zope started, import demo.zexp and
images.zexp, but accessing /demo blows up with an AttributeError
(details below). I didn't try to troubleshoot past this point, because
by this time I was already convinced that I just had the wrong version
of almost everything.

Overall, I'm still impressed. I wish I could use ERP5 for this company,
but I need to demonstrate basic purchase order functionality by Monday
-- I'm going to need to spend the weekend building something simple on
top of a Zope accounting package I wrote last year. I suspect that by
the time ERP5 is sorted well enough we'll already be entrenched with
whatever I provide next week. I'll need to quickly add inventory,
planning, and other ERP-like features to my own code, and by the time
I've done that it will be difficult to back out of that route. I've
learned a lot just seeing what your thoughts are on how to model ERP/MRP
objects, and am likely to incorporate much of that philosophy into what
we do regardless.

Again congratulations, and I look forward to seeing where ERP5 goes in
the future.

Steve
--
Stephen G. Traugott (KG6HDQ)
UNIX/Linux Infrastructure Architect, TerraLuna LLC
stevegt at TerraLuna.Org
http://www.stevegt.com -- http://Infrastructures.Org


Snapshot of my ./src directory as of this point in time:
--------------------------------------------------------

BTreeFolder2-1.0.tar.gz
CMF-1.4.3.tar.gz
CMFMailIn-1.0.0
CMFPhoto-1.2.3.tar.bz2
CMFReportTool-0.1.1.tgz
CPS-3.0.1.tar.gz
ERP5-cvs_root.tar.gz
Formulator-1.6.2.tgz
Imaging-1.1.4.tar.gz
Localizer-1.1.0a3.tgz
MySQL-python-0.9.2.tar.gz
Numeric-23.1.tar.gz
Photo-1.2.3.tgz
PyXML-0.8.3.tar.gz
Python-2.3.3.tar.bz2
Refresh-0.3.2.tar.gz
ReportLab_1_19.tgz
ZMySQLDA-2.0.8.tar.gz
ZWiki-0.30.0rc2.tgz
Zope-2.7.0.tgz
iHotfix-0.3.0.tgz
itools-0.3.0
itools-0.3.0.tgz
psyco-1.2-src.tar.gz
reportlab-1_19
tcl8.4.6-src.tar.gz
tk8.4.6-src.tar.gz


Details of the /demo AttributeError:
------------------------------------

Site Error

An error was encountered while publishing this resource.

AttributeError
Sorry, a site error occurred.

Traceback (innermost last):

* Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 163, in publish_module_standard
* Module Products.AiHotfix, line 83, in new_publish
* Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 127, in publish
* Module Zope.App.startup, line 203, in zpublisher_exception_hook
* Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 100, in publish
* Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
* Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 40, in call_object
* Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 306, in __call__
* Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 343, in _bindAndExec
* Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 191, in _exec
* Module Products.CMFCore.FSPageTemplate, line 124, in pt_render
* Module Products.PageTemplates.PageTemplate, line 96, in pt_render
<FSPageTemplate at /demo/index_html>
* Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 189, in __call__
* Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 233, in interpret
* Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 663, in do_useMacro
* Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 233, in interpret
* Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 663, in do_useMacro
* Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 233, in interpret
* Module TAL.TALInterpreter, line 463, in do_setGlobal_tal
* Module Products.PageTemplates.TALES, line 220, in evaluate
Line 50, Column 4
Expression: <PythonExpr here.getOrderedGlobalActionList(global_actions)>
Names:

{'container': <CMFSite instance at 43473d10>,
'context': <CMFSite instance at 43473d10>,
'default': <Products.PageTemplates.TALES.Default instance at 0x40a1158c>,
'here': <CMFSite instance at 43473d10>,
'loop': <SafeMapping instance at 447eb680>,
'modules': <Products.PageTemplates.ZRPythonExpr._SecureModuleImporter instance at 0x40a1106c>,
'nothing': None,
'options': {'args': ()},
'repeat': <SafeMapping instance at 447eb680>,
'request': <HTTPRequest, URL=http://localhost:8080/demo/index_html>,
'root': <Application instance at 4346e8f0>,
'template': <FSPageTemplate at /demo/index_html>,
'traverse_subpath': [],
'user': stevegtm}

* Module Products.PageTemplates.ZRPythonExpr, line 47, in __call__
__traceback_info__: here.getOrderedGlobalActionList(global_actions)
* Module Python expression "here.getOrderedGlobalActionList(global_actions)", line 1, in <expression>

AttributeError: getOrderedGlobalActionList (Also, an error occurred while attempting to render the standard error message.)

Troubleshooting Suggestions

* The URL may be incorrect.
* The parameters passed to this resource may be incorrect.
* A resource that this resource relies on may be encountering an error.

For more detailed information about the error, please refer to error log.

If the error persists please contact the site maintainer. Thank you for your patience.
Sebastien Robin
2004-05-17 08:15:25 UTC
Permalink
Hi Steve,

First, thank you about your interest on ERP5.
I'm sorry that you spent so many times on the installation of ERP5. For
sure it is really hard to do it by hand, and it is probably a nightmare.
Post by Steve Traugott
- I didn't know how incomplete INSTALL.txt was until I stumbled across
http://www.en.erp5.org/workspaces/project/guide/ERP5Dependencies/view
-- INSTALL.txt should probably just refer to the ERP5Dependencies
page, so you don't have to maintain that information in two places.
This is a great idea.
Post by Steve Traugott
- I didn't know how incomplete ERP5Dependencies was until I started
realizing that some of the packages listed in ERP5Dependencies in
turn have dependencies that aren't in standard python, Zope, or CMF.
- I didn't realize that ERP5Dependencies was missing critical version
information until I was several hours into the process, when I
started suspecting that ERP5 is not compatible with the latest version
of many Zope products, or perhaps with Zope 2.7 itself...
ERP5 is dependant on many products. That's why we have created many RPMS
for Mandrake GNU/Linux. May be you prefer Debian, but if you want to try
ERP5, the best way is to install Mandrake on one box (it takes only a few
minutes) and then install ERP5 (our packages are on contrib sources of
Mandrake). May be one day someone will do packages for Debian, but it is
not the case actually.
ERP5 is Zope 2.7 compatible, but for some products, we use old version,
and for some others we use old version changed by us, so the best way is
to use our RPMS. By the way, you will be able to find all our versions
thanks to rpm.
Post by Steve Traugott
- By the time a few hours had gone by I realized a great deal of what I
was installing were things that were added to ERP5 in later
iterations, and were likewise things that I wouldn't need myself in
the near future, if ever. I found myself wishing for a more modular
ERP5 -- something that would allow me to just install a minimal core,
then later add reporting, SyncML, psyco, and the like. That might
have made it more possible for me to complete the evaluation.
This would be great. I would like at least to decrease the number of
dependencies for ERP5, but I have more important things to do actually.
Post by Steve Traugott
- I spent a great deal of time trying to build and install all of the
PIL prerequisites, including tcl and tk, before I realized I
apparently just needed to copy Imaging-1.1.4/PIL into lib/python.
Maybe -- still not sure on this one.
I don't know for debian. On Mandrake we use python-imaging.
Post by Steve Traugott
- You probably want to maintain an ERP5-specific get_request patch
instead of using iHotfix -- for one thing, I had to rename it to
AiHotfix to get it to load early enough. For another thing, I'm not
sure that the latest version of iHotfix is compatible with ERP5, or
maybe Localizer. It was late at night by the time I came to that
conclusion, so I don't remember now what the specifics were. I do
# XXX What happens when Localizer 1.0 and iHotfix are installed??
- Because there is no tarball release schedule for CMFWiki, it being an
unsupported product, I needed to get it from cvs.zope.org. But about
2 weeks ago Tres did a lot of refactoring which made CMFWiki
incompatible with the most recent CMF tarball (1.4.3). The symptom
is an error importing a permissions module. See
You should use the tarball stored inside the rpm. We use CMF 1.4.2 without
any patch.

For all problems of install, the only way actually is to use Mandrake
10.0.


Best regards.

Sebastien.
Post by Steve Traugott
http://cvs.zope.org/Products/CMFWiki/CMFWikiPermissions.py.diff?r1=1.1&
r2=1.2 I had to do a 'cvs co -D "April 1, 2004" CMF/CMFWIKI' to get a
compatible version.
- CMFWiki, being an essentially dead product, really ought to be
swapped out for ZWiki.
- After satisfying all the dependencies I could find, a very long list
(several hundred?) of the following sort of error spews into the log
when starting Zope. I spent a couple of hours trying to get rid of
it before finally realizing that it eventually stops after a minute or
2004-05-13T23:08:01 PROBLEM(100) Init Ambiguous name for method of
"setContributorsSet" != "_baseSetContributorsSet"
In the end, I was able to get Zope started, import demo.zexp and
images.zexp, but accessing /demo blows up with an AttributeError
(details below). I didn't try to troubleshoot past this point, because
by this time I was already convinced that I just had the wrong version
of almost everything.
Overall, I'm still impressed. I wish I could use ERP5 for this
company, but I need to demonstrate basic purchase order functionality
by Monday -- I'm going to need to spend the weekend building something
simple on top of a Zope accounting package I wrote last year. I
suspect that by the time ERP5 is sorted well enough we'll already be
entrenched with whatever I provide next week. I'll need to quickly add
inventory, planning, and other ERP-like features to my own code, and by
the time I've done that it will be difficult to back out of that route.
I've learned a lot just seeing what your thoughts are on how to model
ERP/MRP objects, and am likely to incorporate much of that philosophy
into what we do regardless.
Again congratulations, and I look forward to seeing where ERP5 goes in
the future.
Steve
--
Sebastien ROBIN

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Free / Open Source ERP software based on innovative technologies
(www.erp5.org).

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