[schooltool] Current downloads

[Tom Hoffman]

On 5/30/07, Paul Carduner <paulcarduner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I believe there is currently no support for running schooltool, and
> certainly not CanDo on windows.  I personally wouldn't know where to
> begin in making it work on windows - I imagine handling dependencies
> could get quite tricky.  I'm also pretty sure there are zero plans to
> support windows in the future.  If you use Ubuntu though, we are all
> ears!

I wouldn't say there are no plans to support Windows EVER.  There is
no particular reason to think that the current source tree couldn't be
cajoled into running on Windows with a moderate amount of effort.
This isn't a situation where we literally have a native Linux
application that could only run on Windows with significant
re-writing.  In theory, SchoolTool should run without too much effort
on any platform that Python runs on (and, I guess, libxml2), including
Windows and Mac OS X.

Also, in theory, eggs packaging (which is coming along) should make
this easy on Windows, as that should handle the dependencies on
Windows just as it does on Linux.

We simply have limited resources and, in particular, nobody with
expertise in setting up *production* Zope 3 servers on Windows.  I'm
pretty certain somebody somewhere runs  Zope 3 servers on Windows, and
last time I checked there was some code in the Zope 3 source code
which more or less worked, but if it stopped working, I don't know if
anyone here could tell you why.

The problem is that for an application like SchoolTool, being able to
run the server from a terminal isn't enough and can be misleading if
people think they're getting a finished server.  You need to make sure
it works correctly and reliably as a Windows Service to actually use
it in production.

--Tom