[Pipet Devel] New piper version + docs

[Brad Chapman]

Jeff wrote:
> "Get on with it", you say.  Okay, in the spirit of making the main
> distribution simpler and requiring less dependencies, I think Pied 
should be
> distributed separately: separate CVS module and tarball.  

Well, this is easy enough to do. Pied (and Peep and the DL) already 
have a separate configure.in, so you can configure, make and install 
only Pied if you so desire. This means it can be a separate CVS module 
and tarball. There are also top level configure options like 
--with-pied/--without-pied, so you can optionally install it or not.
    I agree that it is a good goal to remove dependencies and have a 
simple Piper core that you can install and will be functional with 
"minimal libraries." However, I don't think we are ready to start 
fragmenting up Piper just yet. Right now, User interface coding is 
probably the most important thing that we need to test and work with 
the underlying code, and Deanne is just getting started on Peep and 
probably still learning to grok all of the crazy terminology we use, 
so I wouldn't count on Peep being ready too soon. In addition, the 
gnome ui will be very important to Jean-Marc and Jarl, since they had 
this previously and want to see this kind of functionality in Piper as 
soon as possible.
    So what I'm trying to say is that the gnome ui should remain our 
default UI for a while, so that we can have something to work with. It 
will be really easy to get it out of the "default" Piper cvs directory 
later--we just need to drop the pied directory out of Piper.
    I agree that reducing dependencies is important, but right now 
what I care about most is having a working implementation. Towards 
that goal, I propose that we stick with what we've got and look at 
having pied be separated out later when other UIs are more ready. 
Plus, this takes pressure for ui design off of Deanne and puts it back 
on the project coordinator, where it belongs :-).

Brad