[Pipet Devel] getting piper built. RPM, deb, etc.

[Brad Chapman]

Steve wrote:
>  > I noticed that PyXML 0.5.1 and 4Suite 0.9 (which contains 4DOM 0.10
>  > strangely) conflict, but not in the way that the piper INSTALL say
they do.
>  > The conflict is over __init__.py and __init__.pyc. Should I be
worried that
>  > no other files were mentioned as conflicting (at least by the RPM
install)?

Jeff wrote:
>  That's a good question for Brad.

Well, I've got a long and a short answer for you. The short answer is:

Yes, python XML libraries are a mess right now. But, you don't have to
worry about it at all because I removed all dependencies for python XML
processing libraries from Piper. Jean-Marc and I extended the XML
processing in Overflow, which uses libxml, and then I moved all of the
code in the DL to use this XML processing through python wrappers around
Overflow C++ code.

The INSTALL file probably needs updating to reflect this.

The longer answer is:

If you ever want to get XML processing in python back into Piper you will
be faced with a bit of a mess in the python XML world. As you correctly
noted, 4suite is now packaging 4DOM, 4XSLT and 4Xpath (you can guess what
all those do from the names :-) together in one bundle (along with some
other stuff), so 4DOM alone is now non-existant.

However, the most recent PyXML versions (0.6.1 is the most recent, I
believe) also ship with the 4DOM library. I'm not sure at all about the
versioning differences between the two.

To make it even more confusing, python2.0 will also ship with XML
processing libraries, including SAX and a new mini-DOM API.

So anyways, that's the situation. I can't specifically say anything about
your conflict problem with rpms unless you can give more info, because
there are __init__.p[y|yc]s in every directory of python code that acts
as a module.

I hope eventually the XML situation in python will be cleaner -- there
are a lot of hard working open-source folks helping with it so once
people find time hopefully the conflicts/confusions will begin to resolve
themselves here.

Brad