[Ifeffit] Ifeffit 1.0076

Matt Newville newville at cars.uchicago.edu
Mon Jan 27 11:03:17 CST 2003


Hi Bruce,

Horae_install is very nice.  As Tsu-Chien originally suggested,
making an installer similar to PGPLOT_install will make
installation easier on everyone.  Like you pointed out, using
wget is a possible problem. I see a few possible improvements.

First, since leonardo has no ftp support and wget is not
installed everywhere, we could use a cars.aps.anl.gov machine
that is open for anonymous ftp.  That would mean a script here to
mirror the directory on leonardo, but that isn't difficult and
only has to work between two machines.  If I did this, I'd
probably also keep a local copy of the latest SixPACK.

Second, since installing the horae implies that perl is installed
and working, Horae_install could be a perl script.  Then it
wouldn't have to rely on the wget, ncftp, or ftp system programs,
just standard perl modules (NET::HTTP or something similar).

PGPLOT_install is in shell-script because it needs to work on
systems without perl or python (there are some!).  By convention,
installation scripts used by configure and make use the 'sh'
shell because it works everywhere.

I don't have a strong preference for these two choices (shell
script and an ftp mirror, or an installer that doesn't need
wget).  The 'do it in perl' variation has another potential
benefit:  automated update notices when athena/artemis are run.
That is, athena could try to check the web page, and if there's a
newer version, ask if you'd like to install it.  That's more work
for the application, but might even work for windows binaries....

--Matt




More information about the Ifeffit mailing list