[Pipet Devel] piper 0.0.0 suggestions

[Brad Chapman]

Hey Jeff;
    Thanks for looking at the package, and for the bug reports!

> I tried installing piper-0.0.0 as root, but running it as jeff, I 
get the
> following errors:
[...snip...trace...]
> The error is obviously because the root owns the file and jeff can't 
change
> the mode.  Looking up the command, it seems chmod is run if 
permission denied
> returned.  Here's why:
> 
> -rw-r--r--   1 root     root         2815 Jun  1 00:35 runpiper.py
> 
> Could/should chmod 0755 be run in the install script?

Ooops, yeah, I am installing these scripts as python modules and not 
as scripts, so they don't get chmoded. I'll fix this. I think I'll 
also double fix it by calling the scripts using "python runpiper.py," 
so this should take care of everything :-)

> /usr/piper/uil/pied/modules/middlecommunicate.py lines 47-50:
> -----------------------------------------------
> 			except socket.error:
> 				if (middle_started == 0):
> 					middle_started = 1
> 					os.system("./loci -g=off &")
> -----------------------------------------------
>                                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>                                                 command not found

Ok, lingering traces of Loci... I'll try to flush these out. Thanks!

[...snip... Jeff wants the scripts in $prefix/bin and the piper 
directory
 somewhere else...]

> My question is: Can we allow 2 locales to be defined on config?

I'll look into this. I guess what I'd probably try to do is have an 
optional configure argument --piperprefix in addition to prefix, so 
you could do:

./configure --prefix=/usr --piperprefix=/usr/home 

and do what you want. Does this sound good? Damn, why can't everyone 
just put everything in /usr/local and be happy with it :-).
 
> Also, for the sake of updating Piper (when that time comes), would 
it be
> better to specify the version number in the path, like...
> 
>    /usr/opt/piper-0.0.0
> 
> ?   So that we don't mix the new with the old.

Okay, I'll look at this too. I think what would be best if you want 
this is to have piper-0.0.0 or whatever, and then a symlink from piper 
-> piper-0.0.0, then when you install you just install the new package 
(piper-0.1) and update the link to point to this. I have no clue how 
to do this, but I can look into it.

> The install instructions are better than
> I've seen for most applications, especially omniORB (ick).  

I'm glad they were helpful. If anything is unclear I'll be happy to 
update it, I think it is much nicer to write nice install instructions 
then to always be answering a million questions about installation. 
Plus then we can give people a hard time if they ask a question and 
don't read the documentation :-).

> I need to get off
> my arse and make a better UI to go along with it.

Hopefully, I'll be able to get a new tarball up within a few days with 
the new corba communication between the dl and uil and this will give 
something a little more stable to work off of. It would of course be 
quite excellent to have improvements on the UIs. This is definately 
one of the most important parts o' Piper, especially since that is 
what a lot of people base their initial impressions on, irregardless 
of how good (or bad) the underlying program is. Plus, no one else much 
likes doing GUI stuff, so we are quite excited that you like to work 
on this!

Brad