Package vs. Source

The first issue I faced was whether or not to use the pre-packaged "Plone installer for Mac":http://plone.org/downloads/. The consensus on #plone seemed to be that all packaged versions of Plone — including the Windows and Mac installers of course, but also RPM and ports installs — are most useful for impressing new-comers to Plone, or perhaps for quick installs on development systems. However, folks doing serious Plone work seem to prefer installing manually from source, both for production and development installations.

I was glad for this feedback, since the Plone installer for Mac does a lot of crazy stuff. In fact, it seems to be the *worst* of both worlds: it lays things out on the filesystem in a very non-Unix way, but if I'm not mistaken it doesn't even give us a thick candy coating for it all. At least the Windows installer gives us a GUI.[4]

I wanted to keep the infrastructure as sane as possible, so I opted for source installs of Python and Zope (and Subversion, incidentally). There were no hitches with any of them. But while I went with a source install for Plone, I took "a different tack with Apache":apache.

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Notes

[4] **Update:** Mark Murphy has replied with "a different perspective":appendix-c regarding the Mac installer. Really it's just a cultural difference: I'm trying to use Mac OSX as a Unix system. (However, I admit that using the word "crazy" is a bit inflammatory; sorry. :^)