[Chimera-users] chimera in fink

[Grant Jacobs]

FWIW, I prefer the .dmg style installer, or at least single package, 
one click installers. Its also useful to have the application 
relocatable to any folder within /Applications.

Fink is useful in that it provides a lot of "raw" Unix stuff to OSX, 
but I find having "yet another" location for software (/sw) a bit 
irritating (yes, I know why its that way). Its another hierarchy to 
maintain, backup, consider each time you're sorting out a software 
issue, etc.

I prefer that GUI-oriented applications go to /Applications and only 
command-line level only applications be in /sw as a sort-of hack to 
add command-line level stuff that is extra to BSD. Another criteria 
would be that any application that you can open from Finder should be 
in /Applications. This follows Apple's logical divide of GUI apps and 
the Unix/BSD level.

Having written all this (!), can fink look after applications 
belonging in /Applications, rather than /sw? I suppose I should have 
asked this first I...


Grant

>We haven't really seriously considered it, no.  One stumbling block 
>is that Chimera really isn't completely open source yet.  We 
>distribute the source to the Python part of Chimera but not the C++ 
>part.  We plan on distributing the C++ part once we have organized 
>it enough that outside developers would have a prayer of compiling 
>it,

:-)

For my money I'd be more concerned about good documentation of the 
APIs (etc) so that people can build on what already exists without 
having to decipher someone else's code base. Just my 2c - my pet 
peeve about open source is that poor or non-existant documentation 
forces everyone up the same time-wasting learning curves.

>but we haven't put in the work to do that yet -- always so many 
>things to do!  The other problem is that we need to track our 
>downloads so that we can report those statistics to our funding 
>agency (NIH).  Perhaps fink allows for that, I don't know.
>
>                         Eric Pettersen
>                         UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
>                         pett at cgl.ucsf.edu
>                         http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu
>
>On Sep 13, 2004, at 1:29 PM, Ersatz Sophist wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>Have you considered distributing chimera through fink?
>>
>>Payam

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