I would split the trees also; I would make amber dependent on ambertools,
with the ambertools location defined by an environment variable - say
AMBERTOOLS_HOME, or something else everyone is comfortable with, while
AMBERHOME remains the root of the amber product. This gets rid of the
duplication issues, allows development work in the separate trees, and gets
rid of the lack of clarity as to what is what, how you build, sequencing,
etc. The fewer overlapping efforts per directory, the better, as a general
rule...
Regards - Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Mathews" <David_Mathews.urmc.rochester.edu>
To: "AMBER Developers Mailing List" <amber-developers.ambermd.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: [AMBER-Developers] separation of Amber and AmberTools?
> Hi All,
>
> I have one quick thought about this and it relates to something I
> do with RNAstructure development.
>
> I would vote for option 1, separate Amber and AmberTools
> repositories, which Dave gave the con of:
> "Considerable code duplication: sqm, pbsa, rism, lib (others?) would
> be present in both releases."
>
> One way to avoid code duplication is for Amber-* to explicitly
> depend on code in AmberTools-*. This makes sense because AmberTools is
> freely available, so it is unlikely that one would have Amber without
> AmberTools.
>
> This would depend on users and developers having the code trees
> adjacent in their directory structure, so the dependencies can be
> resolved. It would also mean that developers would need to do a cvs
> update in both sandboxes to keep things synchronized. There would also be
> some details to work out in specifying exact dependencies if the two
> repositories had version numbers in the directory names. In my opinion,
> this is much better than allowing code duplication, which will certainly
> be very confusing.
>
> Another possible option 3 is switching to SVN, which I understand
> is much better at handling changes to directories. One could then have a
> single repository in SVN that would have Amber and AmberTools
> side-by-side. As versions of each change, new directory names would be
> placed in the SVN repository.
>
> Sincerely,
> Dave
>
>
>
>
> At 09:22 AM 1/30/2010, you wrote:
>>At the developers' meeting, there were various suggestions for how to
>>handle the Amber/AmberTools split. This is a request for comments for
>>some
>>ideas along this line.
>>
>>Option 1:
>> unpack Amber into a tree headed at Amber-11.0/
>> unpack AmberTools into a tree headed at AmberTools-2.0/
>>
>> Each would be a full and separate package. Users would set AMBERHOME
>> to the AmberTools-2.0 location, since Amber codes don't use such a
>> variable. Users would put both Amber-11.0/bin and AmberTools-2.0/bin
>> in their PATH.
>>
>> Amber users would still need AmberTools, as in a package dependency.
>>
>>Pros:
>> Simple to explain to users. We could upgrade AmberTools without
>> worrying about Amber. Amber tests and AmberTools tests would be
>> cleanly separated.
>>
>> Having versioned directory names is more in line with gnu/linux
>> software
>> practices.
>>
>> We could support different compilers/OS's in AmberTools than in
>> Amber;
>> the configure script and config.h file would not be required to be
>> the
>> same. For example, we would probably not need to support pgcc for
>> AmberTools.
>>
>>Cons:
>> Considerable code duplication: sqm, pbsa, rism, lib (others?) would
>> be present in both releases. Bug fixes would have to be made in two
>> places, using different patch files as the two codes diverge. If we
>> indeed have AmberTools releases not coordinated with Amber releases,
>> then we have the awkward situation that the functionality and results
>> for the same calculation (e.g. QM) are different in the two codes.
>> If we truly separate the two parts, we would need massive
>> documentation
>> duplication as well as code duplication.
>>
>> Hard for developers, since the tree that users would see is different
>> from the one we are developing on. (This is probably a minor
>> concern.)
>>
>> Psychologically, we weaken the perception that AmberTools is a
>> "genuine
>> part of Amber". (This might be a rather important drawback; or maybe
>> not.)
>>
>>Option 2:
>> Continue with the current model: both codes unpack into an amber11
>> tree, which AMBERHOME points to. We make sure that any updates to
>> AmberTools (either through bugfixes or an intermediate release)
>> remain
>> compatible with Amber -- no more "jumping ahead" to a new directory
>> tree as we did with AmberTools-1.3.
>>
>>Pros:
>> Doesn't have the "cons" of Option 1.
>>
>>Cons:
>> Doesn't have the "pros" of option 1. Might be quite difficult to
>> meet
>> the requirement that changes in AmberTools have to "work" inside the
>> same
>> tree as Amber itself. Hard to keep licensing terms clear when code
>> with
>> very different licenses reside inside the same tree.
>>
>>Option 3:
>> Something different from the two listed above.
>>
>>Comments? I'd like to get this figured out soon, since attempts to clean
>>up the installation (e.g. merge src/Makefile with src/Makefile_at) depend
>>on what we decide.
>>
>>Please think hard about the branding and perception issues -- the other
>>things
>>are mostly technical that we can probably solve.
>>
>>....thx....dac
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>AMBER-Developers mailing list
>>AMBER-Developers.ambermd.org
>>http://lists.ambermd.org/mailman/listinfo/amber-developers
>
> ___________________________________________________
> David Mathews, MD, PhD
> Assistant Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics
> and of Biostatistics & Computational Biology
> University of Rochester Medical Center
> Room 3-6830
> 601 Elmwood Avenue, Box 712
> Rochester, New York 14642
> http://rna.urmc.rochester.edu
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sat Jan 30 2010 - 09:00:03 PST
