We've all arrived safely at the St. Augustin Sprint (although we're lounging in our rented apartment in central Cologne at the moment, but that's another story involving copious amounts of the local beer simulation named Kölsch...)

One of the great things about sprints are the tiny little hints that get passed around as one sits together. This one is about building Zope from source. Usually that involves downloading and expanding the source into a source directory (or updating a subversion checkout), building it, installing it and then running mkzopeinstance from the software directory that has been created by the installation. If you're following trunk this can become necessary quite often. So here's how Hanno Schlichting (a.ka. the guy next to me on the couch) does it:

python setup.py build_ext -i

The -i option tells setup.py to build in-place, i.e. into the directory you've checked out, meaning that your source directory and software directory are identical. The clou is, when you re-build Zope after a svn-update, the build process is smart enough to only rebuild modified sources, thus reducing the build process to just a few seconds in many cases.

Update: setup.py creates a different directory structure than make install, so e.g. mkzopeinstance is now located in utilities rather than bin. But you found that out yourself already, probably ;-)