I have only installed it from the command line, but that is a matter of typing "./install_cgal --prefix=where_to_install". There are binaries for windows (and I'll check on macs).if cgal can be installed painlessly, i.e., a normal person (non-bioinformatics person or non-computer scientist) can install it with few mouse-clicks or commands (<5) on major platforms (linux, mac, windows), i think nothing would speak against it. also the lib should not mess up the harddisk.
Agreed. Nothing should be harder than "./configure; make install" or running a gui installer (which I think is more of a pain :-) But then again, I can't think of why any library should be harder than that. But some are.if imp depends on libs that are hard to install it will die rather sooner than later.
but otherwise, i think we all want to save time wherever possible. one possibly ignorant question: andrej got along without fancy libs. knowing him, i presume he stole the code from somebody else. can't we simply do the same? the code was pretty fast...
:-) The modeller code doesn't work because it assumes equal sized particles. He also claims he put a fair bit of effort into optimizing it. I don't really feel like spending my time that way. I have looked for good public domain code to steal, but haven't found any.