Anyway we thought to adopt paste-script in our company to generate and
eventually manipulate our python application (since there is quite a
lot of boiler-plate).

Paste-script seems really to be the right tool, the only thing is that
the documentation is a bit lacking and I'm a bit lost on a few
things...

1. when I create a template with a few variables, I would like to make
one of the variables depending on another one.
   So if I do simply
   var('project'...), var('camelized_project'), the second one should
be assigne d to the camelized version of the first.
   Reading also the code it doesn't seem so easy.

   So I thought to do it with cheetah, and I created and imported a
function.
   I can't, however, import the function (which path should I use),
the name of the module is not in the namespace...

2. a project template should be composed by many smaller templates
(which can be single files or a bunch of files).
   I think that I should use "required_templates" for that, or is
there any other way?
   But the mechanism doesn't look very dynamic too...

{{py:
if not camelized_project:
    camelized_project = camelize(project)

The only reasonable way that I see is to modify the "var" class adding
def __init__(self,.... other_var=None, transform_function=None)

And then passing the right function to transform one variable into the
other.
The problem them is that I would have to modify the code in place,
(unless maybe I make a "var" wrapper overriding __init__), which is a
bit hackish solution.

What other possibility would I have?

def check_vars(self, vars, cmd):
    vars.setdefault('camelizedproject', camelize(vars['project'])

So in the run I instantiate three subtemplates and I iterate over them.
Then check_vars has a new variable which is the camelized version.

There are two problems:
- the camelized variable seems as the camelized of the default variable,
  and doesn't change after I set a value. I have the impression that
  without adding some intelligence to "var" is not going to work in this way...

- the template expansion gets stuck here:
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paste/script/command.py", line 218, in run
    result = self.command()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paste/script/create_distro.py", line 133, in command
    vars['egg_plugins'] = egg_plugins
TypeError: 'NoneType' object does not support item assignment

And debugging I see that *vars* is in fact None, but I don't get why,
because right before I call the "super" in check_vars it's actually
still a dictionary...

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---

....
class PSIEgg(Template):
    summary = 'basic egg template'
    _template_dir = 'psi_egg'
    vars = []

class PSIProject(Template):
    """Template for a new PSI project
    """

    egg_plugins = ['PSIManage']
    summary = 'Template for creating a basic PSI application structure'
    _template_dir = 'template'
    use_cheetah = True
    # the vars should be asked and filled in automatically
    vars = [
        var('application', 'Application Name', default='PSI application'),
        #TODO: another transformation for the plugin name
        var('plugin_name', 'Name of the plugin',
            default='PSI Plugin')
        ]

    def check_vars(self, vars, cmd):
        vars.setdefault('camelized_project', camelize_string(vars['project']))
        to_pass = dict(vars)
        super(PSIProject, self).check_vars(to_pass, cmd)

    # override the "run" method
    # + copy variables
    # + run all the subtemplates in the sub_directory
    def run(self, command, output_dir, vars):
        subtemplates = [PSIApp(), PSIEgg(), PSIProject()]

        new_vars = vars.copy()
        new_vars['something'] = 'another thing'
        # TODO: check that it's actually expanding in the right place
        for sub in subtemplates:
            sub.run(command, output_dir, new_vars)

        super(Template, self).run(command, output_dir, vars)