Greg is the real expert here, but he's at SIGGRAPH right now so I'll put out what little I know and let Greg correct anything I get wrong when he has time. Yeah, compiling/linking can be a nightmare when you are trying to use libs you have no control over and that may have been compiled with options you didn't anticipate or from modified sources. That's why we cheat and include everything we depend on (which is one reason Chimera is such a huge download). In particular, we include Tk and Tcl libraries. If you look in Chimera's "foreign" source directory, there is a TclTk subdirectory there. So no worries about out-of-date/incompatible versions and all that.

We have another layer of control in that we're not (currently) trying to provide a package that other people can easily compile on their own system. So therefore we don't need a configure step. Our makefiles have conditionals based on the OS to get the right flags for linking and compiling and whatnot for the systems that we ourselves compile on. A lot of that makefile logic is concentrated in the "includable" makefiles found in the mk directory, so that individual makefiles only have to include the appropriate mk makefile and then customize a few variables themselves.

Eric Pettersen

UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu

On Aug 14, 2008, at 11:54 AM, William Baxter wrote:

Hello Eric,

I'm trying to make an installation package like Chimera's, in which our
software installs its own Python. Can you explain how your installation
package is set up? I have a script that goes through the usual
configure, make, and make install commands, but it encounters different
problems on each platform (for us, Linux and Irix). How does the Chimera
install make sure everything is linked together properly?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill Baxter

--
William T. Baxter, Ph.D.
Wadsworth Center
Empire State Plaza, PO Box 509
Albany, NY 12201-0509

Subject: Re:[chimera-dev] making a python package
  From: William Baxter
  Date: 02:42 PM
    To: Greg Couch

Greg,
thanks for your description. I have another couple of questions.

My script goes through the usual configure, make, make install commands,
but Chimera seems to go straight to compilation. How do you set it up to
be so fast?

Also, finding Tcl/Tk for Tkinter is a headache that seems to be
different on each platform. How do you ensure that Python finds that
right Tcl libs?

The Chimera installation is really admirable and efficient. I'd like to
emulate it as far as possible.

Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill B.

Greg Couch wrote:
On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, William Baxter wrote:

Hello,

we would like to package our software, Spire
(www.wadsworth.org/spider_doc/spider/docs/spire/) the way Chimera is
packaged, with its own Python, Tcl/Tk, and other libraries. Do you have
some documentation, or can you point me toward some resources that
explain how to go about creating such an installation package?

Thanks,
Bill Baxter

We don't have any documentation, but here's a quick description of
what we do binary distributions for chimera:

On Windows, we use the Inno Setup program,
<http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php>.

For Mac OS X, we build a disk image using the hdiutil program. And we
modify the name all of the shared libraries with something like:
   install_name_tool -id @executable_path/$(LIBNAME)

On Linux and other Unix systems, we use a modified self-extracting zip
archive where an installation program is run after the files have been
extracted.

In all cases, when chimera starts up, we set up the environment to get
our shared libraries (and clear the environment of things that would
hurt us, like PYTHONHOME).

   Hope this helps,

   Greg Couch
   UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

--
William T. Baxter, Ph.D.
Wadsworth Center Empire State Plaza,
PO Box 509 Albany, NY 12201-0509