Buildit isn't itself really all that interesting to most people. Buildit "recipes" that actually do something useful out of the box probably are, though.

If you care to see how I tend to use buildit, you can download http://www.plope.com/static/misc/buildit_example-20070204.tgz . This tarball contains a set of buildit recipes, and a driver script with supporting config files that will cause Python, Zope, ZEO, Postgres, and supervisor to be downloaded, compiled and installed on the system from which it is invoked. The driver also causes a number of Python packages, and Zope products to be installed. The recipes in the tarball are known to work on Linux and Mac OS X. I think I may have tried them on Solaris at one point too, but not lately. The recipes included in the tarball are basically the recipes I tend to reuse for every Zope project I work on. They have been developed incrementally over the course of several years.

Running the driver script requires buildit to be installed. See the README.txt in the example tarball for more information.