FSDump Product

  Author

    "Tres Seaver", mailto:tseaver@zope.com, Zope Corporation

  Overview

    FSDump grew out of an itch which many Zope developers have:
    through-the-web development is faster and easier to do, but
    causes significant deployment and configuration management
    problems.  Through-the-web code cannot (easily) be checked into
    CVS, or diffed to show changes, or grepped to find the source
    of an error message.

  Goals

    * The first goal is to ease the burden of getting TTW code
      under version control:  i.e., to make it possible to check
      a representation of the TTW code into CVS, and then to see
      what changes between versions.

    * Keep the file-system representations of the TTW objects 
      simple and "natural" (we are explicitly avoiding XML here).

    * Future goals might include:

      - Two-way migration (e.g., make changes to dumped items in
        vim/emacs, and then import those changes back into the
        TTW code).

  Installation

    See the separate "installation directions":INSTALL.txt.

  Usage

    * Use the "Add list" to create a "Dumper" instance in a folder
      (or Product) which contains the TTW code to be dumped.

    * Supply an absolute path to a directory on the filesystem
      in which the dumper is to create the files (note that the
      user as whom Zope is running needs write access to this
      directory).

    * Click the "Change and Dump" button to do the dump to the
      indicated directory.

  Mapping TTW Code to the Filesystem

    See the "mappings help":Help/Mappings.stx.
    
  Known Issues

    * Some types of metadata ('bobobase_modification_time') won't
      be exported as a property.

