Re: [IMP-dev] Request to simplify IMP config

[Ben Webb <>]

Daniel Russel wrote:
...
> I suggest the configure options simply be
> extra_lib_paths="a//b/lib c/d/lib"
> extra_include_paths="a/b/include c/d/include"
> python_path="a/b/lib/python-2.5/..."
> which get parsed and prepended to the scon environment before any  
> tests are performed and get added to all build environments. (I am not  
> sure if space is the best delimiter, but that can be solved later,  
> perhaps by using python syntax "['a/b/include', 'c/d/include']").

There is already a perfectly good delimiter for paths. It is ':' on Unix
systems and ';' on Windows. Using space obviously prevents filenames
containing spaces from being used (obviously you cannot use : or ; with
regular paths, but everybody is familiar with this restriction already,
since no other tools would work either). The existing IMP scons paths
use standard delimiters. I don't know which delimiters you use in your
recent patch but there is no reason not to use the standard ones.

Otherwise, your patch sounds reasonable to me - except perhaps for the
rpath stuff on non-Mac systems, which is rather controversial on Linux
systems and will not work at all on Windows or many other Unixes - and I
will commit it once a) the nightly builds are fixed and b) I have time
to review it and check out the rpath stuff. (Unless others have
comments, of course.)

> The cgal, boost, em, modeller etc arguments can then be removed and  
> configure can then simply test if it can build against modeller, em,  
> cgal, boost etc and not worry about making sure all the paths are  
> added in the right places.

I agree. Most of these tests could be boolean rather than "package"
options. I guess they are modeled after the autoconf-style --with
options where you can specify a path for such packages, but most people
use package managers these days and so don't specify a path. Like you
say, it leads to all sorts of problems when dynamic linking is used.

> Keren, Javi and I have all at various points been confused  
> and frustrated by imp picking up copies of libimp in the diva modeller  
> build when neither the imp config arguments nor the directory name (/ 
> diva1/home/modeller-SVN)  gave us any clue that such could happen.

I'm not sure how your solution would avoid that since the Modeller run
scripts obviously have to add the Modeller library directories to the
dynamic library path (and just like IMP, they try to do that by
prepending rather than appending). I generally recommend installing
Modeller locally rather than using the build in /diva1 if you want to
build with Modeller anyway.

	Ben
-- 
                      http://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
	- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle