VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 25 2004 - 13:37:31 CDT

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 10:47:15AM +0200, hinsen_at_llb.saclay.cea.fr wrote:
[...]
> Since this is really "just" a build issue, it could be solved at least
> for those platforms that have automated build procedures (RPMs and
> Debian packages for Linux, fink for MacOS). And I guess there would be
> volunteers to do the necessary adaptation of the build scripts. Does
> that sound like a promising approach?

Getting the builds right is hard work, but it is certainly possible.
Another option that appeals to me is to just include the python library
that VMD is compiled against in the binary distribution. This would
eliminate the necessity for the average user to have to mess with
python at all, but would allow them to use any Python-based scripts and
plugins which are compatible with the Python version embedded in the
VMD binary they are running. This would not solve problems where the
user needs to install significant additional 3rd party python modules
into the python library, but I don't know of any easy solution to that
problem at present. As far as I know, Python does not provide an equivalent
of Tcl's "tcl stubs" functionality, so there's basically no way to strongly
insulate VMD against Python version changes and incompatbilities.

What would be ideal would be to implement text interpreters in VMD as
plugins that are completely dynamically linked. There are numerous
difficulties to solve to make something like this possible, but I believe
it might make a lot of these versioning issues less troublesome. The main
problem, as always, is that all of this is very complicated to make work
correctly on all platforms, with win32 being a major offender in particular.

  John 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078