Greetings to everyone, this is an introductory message on the CCPNMR mailing
list.

As you will be aware, the 1.0 beta release of the first CcpNmr software is
now available.  For now there are three separate distributions, increasing
in what is included:

(1) This includes just the CCPN data model API.  This is for people who are
interested in using this API but have no interest in the CcpNmr software.
The only requirement here, in addition to the code itself, is Python 2.2 (it
does not work with Python 2.1 and it ought to work with Python 2.3 as well
but we have not tried it).

(2) This includes the FormatConverter program as well as the API (which it
uses).  This is for people who want to be able to convert to and from many
of the various formats that already exist in the NMR world.  The user
remains unaware that underlying the conversion is the API, but this is the
key.  So instead of writing conversions between every possible set of
formats, the program converts to and from the "universal" CCPN data model
(in memory).  This requires not only Python 2.2 but also Tcl/Tk 8.3 for the
graphical interface (and it might well work with other Tcl/Tk 8.x but we
have not tried it).

(3) This includes the Analysis program as well as the FormatConverter and
the API.  This is for people who want to try out this new assignment
program, which is based (philosophically) on Ansig and Sparky (more the
graphics of the former and the interface of the latter).  It has (pretty
much) all of the Ansig functionality but not yet all of the Sparky
functionality (but it has a few things which Sparky does not have).  There
is still a lot to be done here and we hope that people testing out the beta
version can give us lots of ideas about what they like and do not like, and
what they want in future (we're of course aware of lots of things that need
doing but do not mind being told again).  This program requires not only
Python 2.2 and Tcl/Tk 8.3 but also OpenGL, which in the distribution is
provided by Mesa 4.0.  Note that it's not clear to me that the distribution
needs to include Mesa 4.0 since there do not seem to be any environment
variables associated with it, but it would be needed if you wanted to
re-compile the C code, and see the next but one paragraph for warnings.

The three distributions are available on the web at http://www.ccpn.ac.uk
and also via ftp at www.bio.cam.ac.uk in pub/ccpnmr.  These include the
third-party code for Linux (for other platforms you would need to get the
code yourself).

Note that these binaries come from our own computers which can cause
unforseen problems.  For example, Tix (some third-party code for Python) was
compiled into my Python but I had forgotten about this and it was only when
Tim tried to use this version on his machine that we discovered the problem.
 It is possible there are similar problems lurking that we do not know
about, so let us know.  (I'm particularly not sure about the Mesa aspect,
i.e. whether there are implicit assumptions lurking in the code we have
distributed that hold on our machines but not yours.)

The main developers (so far) for the code are:

API: Rasmus Fogh ([log in to unmask])
FormatConverter: Wim Vranken ([log in to unmask])
Analysis: Wayne Boucher and Tim Stevens ([log in to unmask], [log in to unmask])

For some issues (you can judge yourselves) it makes more sense to email the
CCPNMR mailing list, for others email us directly and after resolution (or
not!) if it seems worthwhile then we would put out a summary message to
CCPNMR ourselves.

We expect there to be relatively frequent updates of the code during this
beta testing stage.  (And there's lots of documentation still to be written
for the Analysis program.)