> for a project of mine, I wanted to be able to use Avogadro (which in > turn uses OpenBabel) to visualize trajectories stored in the VTF file > format [1],
While I'm happy to see new file formats added to Open Babel, if you're interested in trajectories in Avogadro, this may not be the approach you want to take. There has been a Google Summer of Code project on adding additional molecular dynamics support to Avogadro2 including support for a wide range of file formats. (Although admittedly not VTF.) https://github.com/OpenChemistry/avogadrolibs/pulls?utf8=✓&q=+is%3Apr+author%3Abadarsh2+ > 1) Is there a coding style guideline for OpenBabel that you would like > contributed code to follow? We do not have a specific coding style, no. All contributions do go through code review, which in some cases include style changes. > 2) Am I allowed to introduce dependencies to Boost libraries? In > particular, I would like to use lexical_cast, optional, tokenizer, and > the regex library, the latter not being header-only. No, please don't require Boost. We have our own tokenizer code, and some formats do require regex.h, but we're not going to require the Boost library for all of Open Babel, sorry. > 3) Alternatively, are there plans to transition to C++11 or a newer > standard? That would remove the need for some of the Boost libraries. I > noticed that there is already, at least partial, support for C++11, but > the corresponding flags are not being set by CMake, at least not when I > run it on my machine. I'm not aware of any C++11 specific features in Open Babel at the moment. If something has crept in, I'll make sure it's fixed before the 3.0 release. At least through Travis and AppVeyor testing on GitHub, compilers are not set for C++11. While we'll probably turn that on, we will be slow to do so because of the incredible laggy nature of users/packagers. We're aware that Open Babel is installed and compiled by a *wide* variety of sites, including supercomputing facilities that are very slow to adopt newer compilers and distributions. Last time I checked, some of these were still using not-fully-compilant GCC versions. I can understand some frustration at wanting to use more modern C++ features, but generally for writing parsers, I'm not sure why you specifically need Boost or C++ features. Perhaps you can explain what you feel is missing? > 4) Regarding feature-completeness of the contributed code: Do you mind if the > file format support is read-only? Of course not. Many of our file formats are read-only or write-only. -Geoff ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ OpenBabel-discuss mailing list OpenBabel-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-discuss
