[Ifeffit] Importing Multiple Data Sets into Athena

[Matt Newville]

> On Wednesday, February 20, 2013 11:56:25 AM John Hayes wrote:
>> Thank you for your reply. I find your lack of faith...disturbing,

I'd like to take this opportunity to emphasize two points I've made
several times before.   John, I apologize if it sounds like I'm
picking on you.  I don't mean to be, and I might be willing to guess
that you meant this in a joking way, but I also agree fully with Bruce
that the easiest action (simply ignoring you as if you were an
ingrate) is worth resisting.

First, it's not about faith.  John sent files.  Bruce responded to the
question with the facts available.   I can tell you that Bruce and I
just barely have time to even read messages like yours, and it is very
hard for us to respond to all of them.  There have been several recent
questions to the mailing list that I just ignored because the
questions are too vague or outside my immediate interest, and I don't
have time to write "that question is too vague, please be more
specific" to every question.

if you don't like the response based of the files you sent, and expect
an answer based on files you didn't send, then let me remind you that
you are free to solve the problem yourself.    In fact, and quite
seriously, you and anyone else are free to solve the problem yourself.
 The code is available and documented, and you can investigate what it
is doing, find a solution, and change the code.   If you do, please
send a patch back to us.

Second, while the files from HXMA (not unlike some of the files from
my own beamline) are ASCII files, they have enough non-trivial
structure to them that they can not be treated as "plain",
un-structured files for Athena/Artemis/Ifeffit to read.   If you don't
like the way Athena reads the file, write a plugin, or alter an
existing one.

The essential issue is entirely with the expectation that Athena will
read whatever data files you give it in the complex ways you want (for
example, extracting two separate spectra from a single file and
knowing that one is "reference", but also knowing how you want it use
the different columns to average data or do deadtime corrections).
If it doesn't do what you want, fix it: change the HXMA plugin or
pre-parse the HXMA files.   Or, wait for someone else to fix your
problem for you.  That seems like a crowded part of Hell to me.

--Matt

PS: I've made similar appeals for more people to get involved several
time over the past year.  The results are not good.   My sense is that
we really need new people involved, and have reached a good time to
think about changes to the way we operate.  If you're interested in
the future of this software suite (like, should development
continue?), this is the time to get involved.