[cctbxbb] cctbx.python unnecessarily unfriendly

Luc Bourhis luc_j_bourhis at mac.com
Wed Jan 8 17:05:40 PST 2014


On 9 Jan 2014, at 02:00, James Stroud wrote:

> 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”.

The dispatcher's main job is to set PYTHONPATH, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on MacOS X, LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux and PATH on Windows, as well as LIBTBX_BUILD. Thus it can be argued that it is a by-product of the way the cctbx installs itself on a system. By that I mean that if we installed it with distutils like your typical Python package, then /usr/bin/python would be able to run any cctbx-based script because the cctbx shared libraries and Python modules would be where /usr/bin/python could find them, and we would just need to decide on where to put libtbx_env inside site_packages. For historical reasons, this is not the path that was taken. It can certainly be rectified but as Nat said, Phenix takes precedence here, since the cctbx effort ultimately relies on the funding of Phenix. As long as the Phenix people aren't comfortable with removing -Qnew or with making the installation rely on distutils, then so be it.

Luc


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