[Pipet Devel] Installation + Directory clean-up

[Brad Chapman]

Hello o' great ones:
    After I finish and commit the changes to make the python stuff use 
omniORB, I was going to start work on wrapping Overflow's non-GUI UI 
code into the dl. What this means is that we are now going to need 
some formal means to install the Loci part of Piper, since we'll have 
to compile the extensions and C++ code and all of that.
    What I'd like to propose is that we use Distutils to do this 
installation (http://www.python.org/sigs/distutils-sig/). Although 
Distutils will currently require an extra download and install, it is 
the up-and-coming official python installation tool, and will be 
included standard in python 1.6. I have used it for biopython and also 
for XDBM python stuff, and it is quite smooth. *Much* less horrible 
then autoconf, and it generates tarballs and, eventually, ready to run 
"built" distributions. It's pretty darn cool.
    The other options besides this are:

1. Writing our own "installer" program to compile stuff and put it in 
the right place.

2. There is a version of autoconf/automake that can be used for 
python. Although it has been submitted to athe autoconf/make people (a 
year ago, I guess) it is not included with these tools, so this would 
require that we distribute this along with the program.

Any thoughts on this from anyone?

Also, I think we should take this chance to narrow the Loci directory 
structure to not be so deep and expansive. It is going to be a pain to 
install all of this, and plus I think it is a little too deep. What 
I'd like to do is:

1. Remove the 'library' step in the directory structure, since this 
seems redundant with modules (we can pick whichever people like 
better). I'd like to have something for the front (for example) like:

front
   console
   web
   gnome
      config
      pixmaps
      modules

So this will make things less deep and a little more understandable, 
IMO.

2. Cut the stuff which is supposed to hold code out of the 'back.' 
The functionality that was supposed to be here is now in GMS, so we 
don't need the library/modules directories here.

How does this sound to people? Any thoughts?

Brad