[cctbxbb] cctbx.python unnecessarily unfriendly

[James Stroud]

On Jan 8, 2014, at 5:23 PM, Nathaniel Echols <nechols at lbl.gov> wrote:
> True - but our assumption (possibly incorrect) has been that there aren't many people downloading binary builds of CCTBX and then combining them with other Python modules.  The majority of CCTBX "users", as far as I know, are either people actively developing code based on or within CCTBX, or the end users of Phenix, CCP4, etc.

I hope that CCTBX will become more like other python packages and not so insulated by these arcane practices (that probably made sense when first implemented).

The way to promote widespread use is to make CCTBX importable just like any other package, like matplotlib, scipy, numpy, etc. I think CCTBX is the only major package I know of that insulates itself like this and requires its own “dispatcher”.

I already made the first (as far as I know) open source powder diffraction simulator with CCTBX (http://pythonhosted.org/radialx/), so it is a generally useful package.

My simulator already has one user (not including me) even though I uploaded the first release less than 24 hours ago.

But if you read the docs for my package, I recommend to have a separate interpreter for CCTBX specific code and am forced to splice out functionality into separate scripts because of the dependency problems.

James