[Ifeffit] care and feeding of Athena

[Bruce Ravel]

On Wednesday 09 May 2007, Scott Calvin wrote:
> The explanation is eminently reasonable, and so is the workaround
> (use more than one project). If it's not difficult to code, though,
> I'd suggest modifying Athena so that it won't allow you to try to
> import more than, say, 50 groups. That would transform this from a
> bug into a limitation of the program. All programs have limitations,
> of course, but those don't lead to analysis errors. As it stands, an
> unwary user could publish results based in part on screwy data.

Scott, you are the third person to suggest this, either on the list or
in personal email.  I am not completely sold on the correct way to
proceed, so I'd like to solicit opinions from more people on the list.

Given that I have never been able to reliably predict when the problem
under discussion rears its ugly head, I have been hesitant to do the
thing you suggest.  For instance, I could belive that you could run
into a version of this problem by importing and removing 45 data
groups repeatedly.

So what do you all think?  Is it better to impose the somewhat
arbitrary limit that Scott suggests in hopes that it will work as
intended most of the time?  Or is it better to leave things as they
are, allowing you to import more data but running the risk of
corrupting Ifeffit's memory management?

Thanks,
B



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