On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 05:42:52AM -0800, Istvan Albert wrote: -> Hello Russell, -> -> > I'm not sure who would demand that pygr work out-of-the-box. Surely -> > anyone who is about to do a bunch of genome analysis can be expected -> > to spend a few minutes installing a few sensible module dependencies? -> -> I think the issue is not as much out of the box, rather than working -> reliably and across multiple platforms. For example pycdb would not -> work out of the box with python 2.5 there was an API change that -> needed to be applied (found the solution in a blog post). It also will -> not work on Windows.
Cross-platform functionality is definitely one big issue. I do think, though, that working "out of the box" is an important goal. From working support for many years, I can tell you that if you want people to even *look* at your software, you need to make it as simple and easy to install as possible. Every additional install step loses you a big chunk of potential users. We can expect people to have a working compiler on UNIX machines, but that's about it; we really need to have Windows binaries available too. Istvan, are you saying that cdb doesn't work on Windows?? -> What we could do instead is make the back end swappable, the interface -> for an on-disk-dictionary is fairly simple so it does not seem like a -> big undertaking to have multiple options. This would allow people to -> champion their favorite backend, without having to lock out others. Right! Chris has regularly pointed out that backwards compatibility is important to him and other users: we want to be able to load our databases created with Python 2.5 into pygr running under Python 2.6, and maybe even 3.x. That should be possible with a "third party" db like cdb. cheers, --titus -- C. Titus Brown, c...@msu.edu --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pygr-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to pygr-dev@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to pygr-dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pygr-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
