[Pipet Devel] Snazzy CVS commits

[Brad Chapman]

Hey everybody;
	I just commited a whole ton of changes to Piper in CVS which I've
been working on over the past few days that do the following:

1. Remove the requirement for any python XML or DOM libraries. All of my
code which used to do things with XML has been replaced by Overflow code
which does the similar things, so our only XML library dependence now is
libxml (1 not 2, BTW). I don't want to ever hear anyone say I didn't do
my part for removing dependencies :-).

2. Integrate Piper *very* closely with Overflow. I am now using the
overflow UI* libs extensively in the dl and am working on both Overflow
CVS and Piper CVS concurrently. So to follow Piper CVS, you also need to
build from and follow Overflow CVS. You can do a checkout of just the
"Core" libraries that we need for Piper by doing 'cvs checkout
OverflowCore' (instead of Overflow) to get what you need. Overflow is on
sourceforge, so you can grab the instructions from the page there
(http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=590).

3. Provide a drastic speed improvement over what we had before. If you
were using Piper from CVS any time this summer, then you'll see how much
faster things are now.

4. Implement saving and loading of Overflow '.n' files. This *should*
work for any file produced by Overflow, although I haven't done enough
testing to bet anything on it. Crash recovery is also working, so you can
kill the user interface (or just click on the little X in the upper right
corner -- I set that to "simulate" a crash instead of being a normal
logout).

So that's what we've got. I'm going to be doing some serious camping and
canoing over the next week so I won't have e-mail (hell, we won't even
have anything as fancy as a pit toilet :-). So if you have a chance,
please check things out before tommorrow and see if you see any glaring
problems or anything.

That's all to report from the battlefront. Thanks for listening!

Brad