VMD-L Mailing List

From: hinsen_at_llb.saclay.cea.fr
Date: Wed Oct 27 2004 - 11:36:35 CDT

On Oct 26, 2004, at 19:25, Warren DeLano wrote:

> issues. John and I both put in significant work to insure that the
> precompiled executable we ship will work in *most* cases on each
> platform,
> in heterogenous environments, with or without Python of any vesion,
> and even
> for the most naïve users. Even the Mac situation isn't quite as clean
> as you

That is fine, of course. What I would like to see is a way for somewhat
more sophisticated users to get a somewhat more personalized
installation without having to become C or C++ programmers.

I think that the introduction of the role of the "package builder" in
between "developer" and "user" has been a big progress. The package
builder is someone who knows his platform very well and has some
general notions of software development. People who work on Linux
distributions (or fink for the Mac) have that role. For other Unices,
it is often the system administrator who has the required competence.

In a world with package builders as a recognized "profession",
developers write installation instructions for package builders and
package builders provide users with binary packages for very specific
platforms.

Of course a developer can take over the package builder role for a few
platforms himself, but it seems illusionary to me to try to do it for
all platforms. It is always better to let others work for you ;-)

For PyMOL this already works to some degree, it is in fink, for
example. For VMD, the main obstacle seems to be legal, but I am sure
that ways around that can be found. Either package builders provide a
wrapper around the tar.gz file that users obtain from the VMD site, or
they submit their binary packages to that site for distribution.

> Regardless, I do think that all of us (Konrad, John, Michel Sanner, the
> Chimera team, the PHENIX team, the CCP4mg team, myself, and others)
> should
> come to a meeting of minds with respect to how we are going to support
> Python-based interporability on each platform. That would imply a
> standard
> Python build and an agreed set of conventions for linking to it. It
> could
> the system Python on 10.3+ based macs, but the situation is less well
> defined on Windows and Linux.

That approach is worth a thought as well.

Konrad. 

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Konrad Hinsen
Laboratoire Léon Brillouin, CEA Saclay,
91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
Tel.: +33-1 69 08 79 25
Fax: +33-1 69 08 82 61
E-Mail: hinsen_at_llb.saclay.cea.fr
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