[Ifeffit] installation issues

[Bruce Ravel]

Wow!  I was gone for three days and a whole flurry of interesting
issues came up. ;-)

First off, I must thank Mark Jensen for these kind words:

 MJ> Ever since the Windows version of Athena was released, I've been
 MJ> hooked.

I'm blushin'.

Then Mark said:

 MJ> After an apparently successful installation, neither Athena nor
 MJ> Artemis ran, saying that they couldn't locate FileDialog.pm,
 MJ> widgets.pm, or Chemistry/Elements.pm (depending on the
 MJ> program). I was unsure where to get these files, or why they
 MJ> weren't where they were supposed to be, but the
 MJ> Chemistry/Elements.pm file made me wonder if that wasn't part of
 MJ> Atoms3.0. Indeed it is. After installing Atoms, Athena and
 MJ> Artemis both appear to be working correctly. So, Bruce might want
 MJ> to make a change in the intall.unix file to say that Athena (or
 MJ> Artemis) requires PGPlot, IFeffit, and Atoms.

and Paul followed up with

 PF> Although I had "cleaned" and reinstalled several times athena and
 PF> Tk, I hadn't given a second thought to tkatoms -- it had no
 PF> relation to athena, right?  wrong!  Upon reintalling tkatoms,
 PF> athena worked.

For starters, I am pleased that you both were able to solve your
immediate problems.  I am lucky to have such smart users.

This exchange, though, underscores a serious problem.  Eventually I
intend to tie atoms, athena, and artemis (and a feff gui, should I
or someone else ever get around to writing it) into a more cogent
package.  At the current stage both of the software development and of
my understanding of the needs and challanges of GUI EXAFS software, it
is a great convenience for them to be distinct programs.  Still, as
Paul pointed out, there are some ties between the codes.  I use some
object inheritance in athena and artemis, so they do share some code
already.  And one small feature of athena is only enabled if one of
modules from Atoms is installed.  So I have put myself in an awkward
state of having neither a unified suite of programs nor three
disjoint programs.

Clearly what I need to do is to make a "clean room" for myself.  That
is, I need a place where I do not have any of my own software
installed.  Then I can install the tarballs individually or in any
combination.  If I do this, I should be able to avoid the problems
that Paul and Mark reproted to this list.

Thanks you both for the excellent feedback.  I have said it before and
I'll say it many times in the future -- this stuff is much better
thanks to you guys providing feedback.


Why having an out-of-date atoms resulted in the error that Paul
described is a bizarre mystery to me.  And why lacking atoms gave Mark
an error about widget.pm is equally strange.  I'll look into all of it
and certainly will work on the installation scripts.

Regards,
B


-- 
 Bruce Ravel  ----------------------------------- ravel at phys.washington.edu
 U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Code 6134          phone: (1) 202 767 5947
 Washington DC 20375, USA                             fax: (1) 202 767 1697

 NRL Synchrotron Radiation Consortium (NRL-SRC)
 Beamlines X11a, X11b, X23b, X24c, U4b
 National Synchrotron Light Source
 Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973

 My homepage:    http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel 
 EXAFS software: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/