Don Armstrong <d...@debian.org> writes: > On Sat, 26 Apr 2014, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> And simultaneous installation of multiple versions of packages is >> simply a requirement for many research computing scenarios, usually >> because there's a lot of bespoke scientific code that accomplishes some >> specific goal but was not written to the standards one would expect >> from professional programmers, and therefore doesn't easily work with >> newer versions of libraries. > The right way to handle this for research computing scenarios is to > deploy virtual machines with specific versions.... otherwise you're > constantly battling with trying to make sure that you're actually using > the version that you think you're using. Yeah, usually what happens in practice is that a complex set of environment variables and shell scripts are used to let people set up their local environment to pick up a particular version of a package, but the amount of combinatoric complexity that involves is rather high. Containers would be a better environment, but you have to make them very, very simple to set up. > The quality of almost every single piece of scientific code I've ever > worked with is so appalling that I'm always amazed when any of it > produces any useful results, ever. And lets not even talk about whether > the results it produces are accurate or reproducible... Well, yes. It's a ton of code written by people who aren't really programmers and who have lots of other things they care more about than becoming better programmers. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/871twidsdt....@windlord.stanford.edu
