Products.enablesettrace now available as an egg!

The summary: as of today, you no longer need to checkout enablesettrace from the Zope Subversion repository. You can just use the Products.enablesettrace egg to debug your restricted Python code.

As a Plone developer you still sometimes have to deal with “Script (Python)” objects and Python scripts in the skins folder. There are even times you want to break into the debugger in one of those scripts. Up until now, you needed to do a checkout of the Products.enablesettrace product from the Zope Subversion repo. Not a problem as such, but it does feel a bit old-fashioned. Especially given the fact that Plone is fully egg-based since version 3.2 (February 2009).

Another ‘issue’ I had with the original version was that it didn’t allow me to use ipdb. And since I’m a fan of IPython, I prefer ipdb over pdb any day.

My initial approach to the latter issue was to store a customized version of enablesettrace in our company Subversion repo. Which worked out fine until we had a third party using our buildout (which used our custom enablesettrace version). To make a long story short, I decided to “eggify” the product and share it with the world by releasing Products.enablesettrace on PyPI.

By the way: I don’t have write access to the Zope subversion repository, so I though that was a good enough excuse to put the code on GitHub instead.¹ But given the fact that the original code hasn’t changed in 4 years, I suppose that this won’t be a problem…