On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 2:41 PM, Brent Krueger <kruegerb.hope.edu> wrote:
> I know we had a lot of discussions about python back earlier this year, but
> I'm not sure whether this point came up exactly.
>
> We've been doing some work installing AMBER onto very bare-bones Linux
> machines and have found that python is required in order to complete the
> configure process. This is true even when one wishes to use the MINICONDA
> that will lie within the amber tree.
>
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding what MINICONDA is (is it not a full python
> install on its own?) but it seems a little silly to me to require python to
> already exist on the system when our recommended installation will, in
> fact, not use it at all.
>
> I realize that this will not impact most users and that it is trivial to
> install a system-wide python, so this isn't worth spending a lot of time
> on. But if there is a simple way around this, perhaps it is worth
> implementing?
>
As Dave mentioned, the Python dependency comes from the update_amber
script. There's a little bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem here.
Miniconda *does* set up a full Python installation, but in principle
configure should be able to apply updates and upgrades *before* running the
actual configure process. So update_amber (and therefore configure) needs
to use Python at least once before Miniconda gets a chance to get installed.
The reason for installing Miniconda is that it's difficult (and
counterproductive) to support a wide range of Python versions in each of
our Python components -- most of them have already dropped Python 2.6 and
below as well as Python 3.2 and below. update_amber is an exception -- I
wrote it specifically to support anything higher than 2.4 using only stdlib
modules that were available in each of those versions so that it will run
with the system Python sans 3rd-party packages. After all, it's the only
Python package you simply *can't* refuse to use in Amber :). [1]
All the best,
Jason
[1] Except, of course, if you use --no-updates (must be first argument
after ./configure), as Dave also mentioned.
--
Jason M. Swails
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Received on Fri Jun 23 2017 - 14:30:02 PDT
