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@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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