[Debian-med-packaging] someone prepared to package GAMGI (molecular visualization and editing)

[Carlos Pereira]

Hi Steffen,

1) Regarding my previous message, on environment variables,
on second thoughts, I think it makes no sense to set the BROWSER 
environment variable, because:

a) this is a user-specific choice, not a system-wide information, valid 
for all users.
b) it might collide with other usages for this environment variable, 
which has no GAMGI_ prefix.

So please just set the GAMGI_HELP and GAMGI_EXT environment variables, 
these are quite important.

2) other topic that might be useful to mention is that GAMGI can be 
launched from the command line with an arbitrary number of native data 
XML files, for example:

prompt>gamgi file_1.xml file_2.xml file_3.xml ...

file_n.xml can be a local file, prefixed by the usual relative or 
absolute paths, or a remote file available through HTTP or FTP. GAMGI 
starts, then loads file_1.xml, then file_2.xml until all files are 
imported. If an error is found that file and the remaining ones are not 
imported (an an error message is shown). As object and configuration 
data have the same XML structure (and in fact can be mixed inside the 
same file), this can be used for example to import first a file with 
configuration data, and then the object data:

prompt>gamgi my_defaults.xml objects1.xml objects2.xml

Users can, for example, have an alias as this, in the .bashrc file:

alias gamgi='gamgi ~/gamgi/my_defaults.xml'

so everytime they launch gamgi, they automatically import the file 
my_defaults.xml, with their own preferences.

I suggest you try this, from your command line:

gamgi http://www.gamgi.org/dat/molecule/flavors/cinnamon.xml 
ftp://ftp.gamgi.org/gamgi/dat/molecule/flavors/garlic.xml

You will get two molecules, with the active principles for cinnamon and 
garlic respectively, one coming by HTTP the other by FTP. You can for 
example choose Molecule->Select to see the tree structure of the two 
molecules, and then click with the mouse on the molecules, to select 
them, one each time. See how the selected object, in the statusbar 
changes. Dragging the mouse, you can now rotate, move, scale the chosen 
object.

I hope these messages are usefull and not too long ;-)
Carlos