[Pipet Devel] Installation + Directory clean-up

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> This is definately not a replacement for autoconf/automake, so this
> would just be used to manage installation of the python parts of the
> program. So I guess the idea is that Piper, as it stands right now,
> will be distributed in two "sections":
> 
> 1. the pyGTK UI and the dl -> Distutils installation

Build-Time System (BTS)

BTW, what about non-Python UI's?

> 2. the BL and PL (GMS and Overflow) -> autoconf/automake installation

and Run-Time System (RTS)

> > It would be nice if the user could just type "install".
> 
> Well, Distutils is close. To install everything you need to type:
> 
> python setup.py install
> 
> How's that? :-)

Pretty simple :-)

> It should be easy enough to
> tie the python Distutils build with the configure builds for the bl
> and pl, if we want the user to be able to type one command and get
> everything installed.
>     To do this, we just need to call './configure && make && make
> install' after the Distutils finishes installing the python parts of
> the program, and this is really easy to do.

Yeah, I would like to see a single-command install process.

> I'll get the new directory structure installing with
> Distutils, so everyone can look at how that works first hand.

Okay, then you're talking about just the Python stuff (UIL and DL), because
Distutils doesn't handle C/C++.  Right?

> It is
> really smoov, so I'm sure everyone will dig it. Then once we get stuff
> hashed out, we can work on fixing cvs (maybe we should just import the
> new structure as  a new module--> piper.

Yes, it'd be MUCH easier to re-import everything.  (Getting rid of "library"
will also break a lot of things :-( )

> Thinking about it more, I'd like to completely get rid of both 'main'
> and 'back'. So what would be left is the following type of structure.
> 
> piper
>     ui -> What is currently in 'front'

Could we use "uil" instead of "ui"?  Just semantics here, but we're really
talking about a "layer".  The UIL is a layer comprised of multiple UI's, and
more than one UI will go in the "uil" directory.

>     dl -> what is currently in 'middle'
>     piper_config.py -> What is currently in const.py. The piper
> configuration
>     file.
>     piper -> The main executable.
> 
> So then during the install, we will install the piper directory with
> all of the libraries that make things work inside of the
> 'site-packages' directory, and install the piper executable in
> <prefix>/bin (where <prefix> is specified as a flag during the install
> (just with with autoconf)).

Hold on a sec.  My understanding is that the "site-packages" directory is used
for Python development modules/libraries and not for applications.  Have you
heard or seen otherwise?  Are we considering most of Pied and the DL to be
development libraries like PyGTK?

Don't we need a home directory for Piper anyway?  I was thinking of putting
the Python code in something like /home/piper, and then a symlink can go in
/usr/bin.

>     Now that we are installing things, we will also not be able to
> save temporary and permanent xml files "inside of" the directory
> structure (since otherwise the user will have to run stuff as root to
> write things inside the directory structure, which is not a good
> thing). I'd like to suggest that we store all xml for piper inside
> $HOME/piper, where $HOME is the environmental variable specifying the
> home of the user running piper. How does this sound to people?

Definitely, each user needs to keep his/her own stuff in his/her own space. 
Most Unix apps work that way.

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
                      |                                  |
                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
                      |                                  |
                      |        BIOINFORMATICS.ORG        |
                      |           The Open Lab           |
                      |                                  |
                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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