On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Mark Taylor wrote:
> > The problem, as I see it, is namespace pollution. We may have a smallish
> > set of commands per package at present, but it's only going to grow, I
> > remember when KAPPA had about 10 commands (got the SUN around somewhere),
> > and there were a few packages, look at it all now. Any choice we make must
> > be at least scalable in principle. Keeping things in separate directories
> > per package is almost guaranteed to be manageable, just not as convenient.
> >
> > One thought I've toyed with is just to have the "entry points" in the lib
> > and bin directories, so our main jar files lives in "lib" and resolve into
> > sub-directories for extra and third party stuff, which is OK, but for
>
> I'm inclined to support that.
OK, when I find a moment I may look at this again.
> > commands you'd then start writing things like:
> >
> > % kappa cadd in=xxx const=10 out=xxx
> > % kappa cmult in=xxx ....
>
> this is how I've done the ndtools (proto-)package - mainly driven by
> the fact that writing the scripts is a bit of a pain (not necessarily
> a good reason I admit). It would be possible to do it like this
> and have a bunch of scripts one-per-task within the bin/package directory
> so you could refer to them either way .. or maybe that's getting
> a bit baroque.
Thanks, thought I'd seen this idea in actual use somewhere. Clearly if we
did both these jobs then user could add important packages to their PATHS
permanently and lightly used one by this method (or maybe Norman's "use").
> I agree that there is a namespace problem for 'toolkit' type packages
> following the KAPPA/CCDPACK/FIGARO/etc model. But packages which are
> principally a GUI tool like Treeview & TOPCAT are not
> going to proliferate the number of commands associated with them,
> which is why I've put them straight in the main bin directory.
Don't be too sure about this, SPLAT and GAIA have a few commands around
besides the obvious ones. These make them usable from scripts (gaiadisp,
splatdisp) so you can pop up images and spectra. SPLAT also has a few
beanshell scripts for exposing fitting gaussians and the like. I expect
there some useful bits in TOPCAT like that.
Cheers,
Peter.
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