On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 10:33 +0200, Tim Gruene wrote:
> with every python script one has to distribute a specific python
> version
... and with every program one has to distribute binaries for every
platform... more food for my prejudice against software ;-)
This really is not about python, it's about distributing with or without
dependencies. And you are absolutely right about that: for example,
ccp4-6.2.0 comes with python2.6.7 embedded, and, if one goes with
defaults and downloads coot with it, python2.6 in coot's lib folder.
Same with phenix - you get python2.7 with it and python2.4 with
pymol0.99 that comes with it. By the way, I already have another pymol
that I compiled myself (1.4) and the one from ubuntu repositories (1.2).
Except for the latter, each carries its own copy of whichever python it
needs. Every single python avatar takes 50-100Mb of space, which is
fortunately not in short supply.
This is why the right way to distribute *nix software is to distribute
software itself and ask the end-user to get all the dependencies (not
that hard these days). It is fully understood, of course, that people
that do this for living find it more troublesome to deal with me whining
about how their software is screwing up my matplotlib than to just give
me another python copy. What's an extra 50Mb between friends ;-)
Cheers,
Ed.
--
"I'd jump in myself, if I weren't so good at whistling."
Julian, King of Lemurs
