configuring development eggs in zc.buildout

Question

I am new to zc.buildout and am looking to get started with it. I was looking over the concept of configuring eggs as parts and modules being developed as develop-eggs in the cfg file. I am having trouble figuring out how I should go about configuring an external dependency for my module being developed. I figured that the module I am writing goes in as a develop-egg in the buildout.cfg file. My module also depends on another external module say ABC. The ABC module is listed in my module's setup.py as a dependency. But should I also list it as a part in my buildout.cfg file.

I am really having trouble figuring out what external dependencies go under parts in the buildout.cfg or under dependencies in the my module's setup.py. The way I think about it, any external dependency being listed should be needed by my module, else it is not getting used and shouldn't go in the configuration at all (considering buildout use cases for setting up dev environments). So, what are the external dependencies that need to be listed as parts in the buildout.cfg file?

Thank You, Vish

Answer 1

I suggest using the mr.developer extension for zc.buildout:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mr.developer

The auto-checkout option can be used to perform checkout of the packages from a repository that are actually needed for development. The dependencies specs in your setup.py file have basically nothing to do with deployment vs. development.