[Debichem-devel] some improvements to the vmd packaging

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

Quoting Michael Banck (2013-08-31 23:23:32)
> Would you like to join the Debichem team and just commit your changes to our
> repository?  If so, do you have an Alioth account already?

I have an alioth account but sadly I dont think I have enough spare time for a
long term commitment to debichem :(

But since we use vmd at my uni, you might see another mail by me with some more
fixes. I plan to write to the vmd list next - maybe some of my changes can be
applied upstream.

I will mention the free-ness issue too but as I do not have high hopes, I tried
to write a script which automates the login and download process:

--%<----------------------------------------------------
	import mechanize
	from lxml import etree
	import sys
	from subprocess import call
	
	br = mechanize.Browser()
	
	br.open("http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi?UserID=&AccessCode=&ArchiveID=1190")
	def foo(n):
	    try: return "UserName" in n and "Password" in n
	    except: return False
	br.select_form(predicate=foo)
	br["UserName"] = sys.argv[1]
	br["Password"] = sys.argv[2]
	resp = br.submit()
	
	def foo(n):
	    try: return "LicenseText" in n
	    except: return False
	br.select_form(predicate=foo)
	print br["LicenseText"]
	
	def foo(n):
	    try: return "AgreeToLicense" in n
	    except: return False
	br.select_form(predicate=foo)
	
	resp = br.submit("AgreeToLicense")
	
	tree = etree.fromstring(resp.read(), etree.HTMLParser())
	call(["wget", "http://www.ks.uiuc.edu"+tree.xpath("//meta[@http-equiv='refresh']/@content")[0][6:]])
-->%----------------------------------------------------

Strangely enough, the final download does not require any cookie or login info
anymore. Even a directory listing is allowed. Not writing the direct url here
as I have no clue about legal trouble but by running above script with a valid
username and password you can easily figure it out yourself.

Maybe such a script allows to make a package which at least automates the
downloading an package building part. This would circumvent the
un-redistributibility (does that word exist? :D) of vmd. Probably similar to
the adobe flash situation.

cheers, josch