Plone buildout error when using a package created with paster

Question

I'm new to Plone (4.1) and following Martin Aspeli's Professional Plone 4 development book. While following the book to create a custom theme, named optilux.theme (chapter 8), I encounter the following errors: http://pastie.org/3201791

The first error is from zopeskel when creating the theme distribution using

../bin/zopeskel plone optilux.theme   

I can, however, customise the files zopeskel generated as stated in the book (setup.py, configure.zcml, metadata.xml).

The second error is from running buildout with the freshly added theme, using http://good-py.appspot.com/release/plone.app.theming/1.0b9 as KGS.

My question is twofold:

1. are the 2 errors related? ie. does the zopeskel error imply buildout will not find the optilux.theme?
2. how can I make buildout find optilux.theme and deploy succesfully?

Version Overview: Plone 4109
CMF 2.2.4
Zope 2.13.8
Python 2.6.7 (r267:88850, Aug 11 2011, 12:16:10) [GCC 4.6.1]
PIL 1.1.7

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Yes, these two errors are related.

At the line #52 Zopeskel/Paster says that it can't retrieve the 'egg-info' directory and the creation process ends incorrectly.

This is a common issue (tickets #384 and #10963).

That issue is linked to a known bug in setuptools versions prior to 0.6c7. Just update your setuptools package to the latest release (/path/to/your/python/interpreter/easy_install -U setuptools) and re-start the wizard for creating the package.

Edit (this follow the first comment):

Edit your buildout.cfg (or any other *.cfg file that you use as the start point) like this:

[buildout]
auto-checkout = 
    ...
    optilux.theme

develop =
    ...
    src/optilux.theme

eggs +=
    ... 
    optilux.theme

[instance]

zcml +=
    ...
    optilux.theme

Answer 2

I had the "can't retrieve the 'egg-info' directory" problem as well. However, I was using version 0.6c11 of setuptools. It turned out that I had a broken setuptools module. The package was in my site-packages directory but I could not load it. A reinstall of my virtualenv python solved the problem.