[Ifeffit] Demeter 0.9.19

[Matt Newville]

Hi Bruce,

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:04 AM, Bruce Ravel <bravel at bnl.gov> wrote:
> On 01/09/2014 08:24 AM, Stefano Luciano Ciurli wrote:
>>
>> Hello Bruce and thank you for your hard work!
>> instructions to install on OS X 10.6.8?
>
>
> There is not a Mac package.  I do not own a Mac and and so do not have
> the ability to develop a Mac package on my own.
>
> Over the years, no one has ever stepped up to help me develop a Mac
> package for Demeter.  (Or Debian packages, or RedHat packages, for
> that matter.)

Well, I have *tried* many times, and put a fair amount of time in
getting Demeter to work on a Mac.   What I have not done is *succeed*.
  I can tell you that getting wxPerl to work on Mac OSX is far from
simple.  Though Demeter is many years old now, and I've tried many
times over the years (and I using wxPython on Mac all the time), it is
only within the past few months that I have ever gotten wxPerl to
actually build on any Mac, and this was a 10.8 machine.  Currently
(though I haven't looked at it in more than a month), getting the
Ifeffit-Perl interface to build properly with Mac OS 10.8 has me
stumped, as Apple is now using llvm/clang, making it challenging to
work well with gfortran.

Migrating Demeter to use Larch should simplify the situation, as it
would remove the need for the Ifeffit-Perl interface.

> Frankly, the work I do on the Windows package takes a
> lot of time.  The only way I can claim that time fits in my job
> description is because my group uses Windows machines at our
> beamlines.  Help would be welcome to develop packages for Mac and
> other platforms, but despite repeated requests over many years, no one
> has ever volunteered and actually seen it through to completion.

Yes, help building Demeter for Mac OSX would be great.

--Matt