The problem with buildout and PyDev

zope3, cookbook

Lately it has been possible to develop and simply deploy a Zope 3 based application by organizing code in a single Python package that uses zope3 packages as dependency,  plus a buildout recipe that creates a running zope 3 instance based on these eggs. For anyone using Eclipse + PyDev, this approach has the following inconvenience: the `eggs` folder can't be properly imported as external source folder for the project. Eclipse knows about eggs, but only when they're in marked in a .pth file, inside the site-packages folder. Creating a .pth file in the eggs folder and reimporting the folder won't do any good, PyDev continues to ignore the eggs.

Solution? Let me introduce pb.recipes.pydev, which generates a .pydevproject file, based on the dependencies of a bunch of specified eggs (for example, the zope3-dependent application that you're developing). Closing and reopening the project in Eclipse, after generating that file, will reindex the packages and will enable sweet auto-completion, auto-import and "go to source", provided you have the PyDev Extensions.

The recipe has a couple of problems at the moment:

• it triggers recomputing the egg dependencies, which is already done once by the buildout process,
  
• it overwrites the .pydevproject file with a possibly simplified version
• Eclipse doesn't import zipped egg files, so you'll have to keep the the eggs unpacked.