[cctbxbb] Debian Package

[Luc Bourhis]

Hi Radovan,

> For me this is not an issue although I spent already a few months of work.
> I'd be frustrated at first if our efforts would be for nothing

I won't come to that extreme. We will try our best to see how and when we can stop relying on our own patched versions of libraries. However, the example of ANTLR that made the limelights earlier in this thread demonstrates we won't always be able to achieve that goal. We will definitely discuss those issues during the next Phenix workshop in Cambridge in September. Marcin will be there, so we can see about what can be done about that ccp4io of ours.

> but I can accept this and I'd probably try to work around this somehow.
> I've my own projects based on cctbx and I'm really a big fan of cctbx.
> But I can't distribute my projects properly without bundling cctbx with it. 
> We are building a cascade or snowball system were everyone is bundling one another. 
> This leads to chaos.

As it should be clear, I fully agree with you on the principles. But we need to be realistic as well.

> I contributed for a few free open source projects and from my experience I have to
> say it's always good to build and hold a community to benefit from peoples work.
> But if this is not what you want and you want to keep your development in
> a small circle than it's your choice and we can't do anything about it besides
> to fork (which is unrealistic and unlikely).

The cctbx has always been strongly advocated as a open project that welcomed contributions and a significant amount of time has been spent on teaching people about that, e.g. at the IUCR computing schools or the computing fayres organised during various crystallography conferences. With mixed results to be honest. It has nevertheless always been a strong motivation for Ralf and for myself as well. So it makes us very happy that you are so much interested into the cctbx that you have found the motivation to do all that work.

But it happens that the cctbx core contributors tried to build such a community on their own terms, by using adhoc tools and methods, like distributing cctbx binaries with all deps for cctbx users, simply asking new developers to replace the source directory by a checkout. They have always been aware that this was at odd with the way most open source software are developed on Linux but this sounded like a good compromise for everybody.

So now it appears that it does not work, not only for you, but for Soleil as an organisation. So definitively, that's strong enough a motivation to see how we can accommodate your needs. That your proposed patches carefully try to keep your way and ours orthogonal by relying on extra options passed to libtbx/configure.py make them even more likeable. We will apply your patches in due course. But I would like to make it clear that 100% of the cctbx dependencies we currently bundle will not go away, and that it will take quite some time before we start reducing the count.

Best wishes,

Luc