[Pipet Users] Design

[Nicolas Chauvat]

> Filled in the DL and BL alinea's. All the DL text I copied out of
> Brad's document @
> http://www.bioinformatics.org/piper/documentation/dl_info.pdf. The BL
> text is new.
> 
> For all convenience the doc is available in Piper's cvs repository, or
> for all you hard core techies it's attached.

Hi folks,

I read both documents, and if I my take the place of the devil's advocate,
I'd say that they describe *how* things will be done, much more than
*what* things will be done.

What is the intended usage? What will piper be good for? What do we
agree it can be bad at? What piper capabilities are needed to get
piper to be as useful and easy to use as we expect it to become? What will
the user see in terms of features? How will the user(s) use it?

I think that these are the questions we should write down answers for
first of all. Then ask: "ok, now how do we design a system that does
that?". I know there are already much work done on the design and a lot of
good answers to that latter question, but I'm afraid we're not clear
enough about the first set of questions (at least I'm not, please try to
educate me).

The documents talk about layers, interfaces, P2P, corba etc. Those are
means, not ends. What are the ends of Piper?

I'll write down what I think for everyone to comment on it.

-- 
Nicolas Chauvat

http://www.logilab.com - "Mais où est donc Ornicar ?" - LOGILAB, Paris (France)