On 07/10/2009, at 16.19, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 10:36 Mon 05 Oct , Kevin Cowtan wrote:
>> Given that the current CCP4 build system is somewhat non-standard, I
>> might be prepared to support an effort which provided an alternative
>> build system to work with the CCP4 provided source code, however.
>
> I made about half of such an effort a few years ago
> <http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/ccp4-6.0-autotool.tar.bz2> -- I
> think
> it took a week or two of spare time. If there were sufficient interest
> from CCP4 developers in actually making the switch to a standard,
> broadly accepted if not universally loved build system (i.e.,
> autotools), I could probably be convinced to finish the job.
Heh, surprise, surprise, I've done a similar thing:
http://code.google.com/p/ccp4-autotools/
I announced the effort in emails to the CCP4 devs but never heard a
word back. I concluded they're not interested.
> On 05/10/2009, at 11.36, Kevin Cowtan wrote:
> I was a vocal advocate of the GPP4 effort to the CCP4 exec while
> there were problems with the licensing of the CCP4 core libraries.
> Now that the core libraries are back under LGPL(v3) I'm afraid that
> I don't see the point. Given the amount of work supporting software
> generates, and more importantly my total inability to understand
> autoconf, I have to think very carefully about what I support.
gpp4 is now in the repositories of several Linux distributions, and
also Fink for OSX. The only way it could happen if it was packaged as
a library and not as an integral part of a huge suite which otherwise
is distributed under a non-free license.
The same is true of the clipper and mmdb libraries.
That means that users of those libraries do not need to worry about
autotools, compiling or anything else, but can install the libraries
for the distribution and link their software to them using generic -
lgpp4, -lmmdb or -lclipper-core switches.
Of course, you don't _need_ to do things the easy way.
Cheers,
Morten
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