Hi Bruce, Sorry for taking a few days to come back to this, but I do have a few comments on this plan even if most of the thread devolved into a discussion of current issues with Artemis.... First, the overall plan for a 'development' branch for artemis seems OK to me. Perhaps the principle questions for users are: 1) will both 'stable' and 'development' be supported for bug fixes, and 2) how quickly will developments be folded back into 'stable'. The main concern for me is that it will be too much work for you. So, we all promise to forgive you if you give up on having two different versions of artemis as too much work, and be patient when the very nice features in the development version are slow to make it into the stable version. Second, making 'development' be source-only makes sense. Windows users interested in the development version could use ActiveState perl and the current dlls, or cygwin (I am just coming back to trying cygwin after several years, so I am not sure how easily it will all work, but my understanding is that it can work). Third, your list of proposed developments seems OK to me. I'd guess that many of the listed features-to-add could be added to 'stable' without much chance of breaking other things. But artemis is a hard problem, and deciding that a partial or total redesign is OK. Personally, I don't think you should rule fairly dramatic changes (including asking more from Feff6 and Ifeffit) just to get more features in Artemis. None of the feature on your list are more important than having a well-planned and -documented internal structure that can last many years. Fourth, separating horae into Athena and Artemis for development might be OK - I can certainly understand that Athena seems done - but might cause some problems or limitations too. The first and last item on your proposed list of changes (better atoms interface and 'a bunch of internal changes') might benefit Athena too. Another possible goal might be to make the horae perl modules more "scripter friendly" so that others could use or add to the components of Athena, Artemis, etc. The Xray module with Atoms was (and is) very useful, and I'd suspect that there would be folks interested in using and contributing components, with the CIF/PDB readers being a prime example: I assume you'll rewrite much of these contributions to fit your needs. It might be better to have components that make this and other developments easier. And of course, making it so that others can write elaborate perl programs based on your work would be highly useful. I guess the two points I'm trying to make are that a development branch is a good excuse to _really_ change (and break) things not to just add a few features, and that a sound and documented internal design cannot be overemphasized. --Matt