Ian's words need to emblazoned over all CCP4 distributions. Users are an essential part of any development work..
As a developer I would never consider constructive user feedback as a complaint. Feedback is a critical component of the software development process and I think I speak for all developers in only wishing that there was a lot more of it! On 24 November 2017 at 10:06, Ian Tickle <ianj...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Graeme > > On 24 November 2017 at 06:33, Graeme Winter <graeme.win...@diamond.ac.uk> > wrote: > >> >> Despite appearances people do not like to contact authors of software >> packages to complain. >> > > As a developer I would never consider constructive user feedback as a > complaint. Feedback is a critical component of the software development > process and I think I speak for all developers in only wishing that there > was a lot more of it! > > I have been asked on several occasions to incorporate the anisotropy >> correction into xia2 as it 'always makes things better', and have resisted >> on the grounds that the purpose of the package is to faithfully analyse the >> data as provided and provide uncorrected intensities as output. The >> corrections should ideally be performed within the downstream software, >> since they then know exactly what has happened to the measurements and will >> make fewer (ideally no) incorrect assumptions. >> > > This assumes that it make sense to perform the corrections downstream of > processing. In the case of anisotropy this may not be the case: the > anisotropy correction is likely to be intimately linked with the batch > scaling and error model, so that it only makes sense to incorporate the > anisotropy correction as an integral component of the processing pipeline, > not downstream. > > It's already routine to write out multiple versions of e.g. phases, >> weights, sigma values etc based on different assumptions and flag then >> accordingly - perhaps we should be doing the same with modified >> intensities, so that packages which require the unmodified values could >> ignore the corrected ones. That would avoid the need for any health >> warnings and ensure changes in the wider environment do not invalidate >> assumptions... >> > > I totally agree! STARANISO has the option to transfer over all the > uncorrected data and append the corrected data to it. This used to be the > default but is no longer (you have to check a box to activate it), because > users seemed to get confused by having too many MTZ columns to choose from! > > >> Obviously, all of the above is my humble opinion and other opinions are >> equally valid. >> > > Likewise! > > Regards > > -- Ian > >
