[Chandler-dev] Plugin parcel development (& the feeds tutorial)

[Grant Baillie]

I was looking at updating the Chandler feeds tutorial for 0.7α2, and  
this ended up being more difficult than I had anticipated, so I'm  
sending this out to the list for comments. (I understand that egg- 
based plugin development isn't fully baked -- or should I say fried?  
-- yet, though).

The 0.6 instructions are:

    - Download Chandler (end-user)
    - Blow away everything inside parcels/feeds (which no longer  
exists in α2)

My assumption is that what we want to have in the tutorial are  
instructions like:

    - Download Chandler (end-user)
    - Make a FeedsPlugin folder, create a simple setup.py (to be  
supplied in the tutorial), and then use "setup.py develop". Then,  
create a feeds subfolder, and proceed with the tutorial (basically,  
as written).

It looks as if this is pretty broken right now in the end-user  
distribution: To get the setup.py to work correctly, you need to run  
Chandler's RunPython script. However:

1) On the Mac, the RunPython script is confused about where to find  
the Python framework, and will always fail with an error message  
about having to unset the CHANDLERBIN environment variable. The only  
way around this I could see is to create some symlinks down inside  
the Chandler app wrapper. (FWIW, I filed Bug 6019 about this).

2) On Linux, you need to set a CHANDLERHOME environment variable if  
you want RunPython to work from outside your Chandler directory  
(Presumably, this will be the case at least sometimes for external  
parcel developers).

3) I don't have a Windows machine right now, but so far as I can  
tell, RunPython.bat won't ever work from outside of the Chandler dir.

Is there a way to make this easier? For example (this is what I'm  
telling interns/SoC developers), we could specify that you get the  
chandler source and do a make install. In general, that adds some  
requirements: subversion, make (a 900MB Xcode download on the Mac ;),  
and cygwin on Windows.

--Grant