Re: Anonymous downloads for NCL/NCARG, PyNIO and PyNGL?

Hi Charlie,

I agree that this download process is a bit of a pain.

The reason why we have to do it this way is because we have to be able to report
to NSF (our main funders) why we should be able to continue developing the
software. Anonymous metrics don't carry nearly as much weight as being able to
indicate what types of sites (universities, research companies, weather bureaus,
government sites, etc) are downloading the software, and how many of these
downloads are actually from unique users. Being able to say that X number of users
from Y countries is also very valuable to NSF. We have to prove that NCL is having
an impact on science, and that is one way of doing it.

There are some folks who have provided packaged NCL binaries for LINUX systems,
and we just quietly look the other way. :-)

--Mary

On Oct 12, 2010, at 11:37 AM, Charlie Sharpsteen wrote:

> Greetings NCL Community,
>
> I am considering writing build scripts that would make NCL, PyNIO and
> PyNGL available through a package manager. However, an issue that is
> causing a sticking point is that the tarballs containing source code
> for these packages are not available for anonymous download from
> earthsystemgrid.org. Even though registration and downloading are
> free, this extra step creates some problems:
>
> - The presence of an additional step could turn many potential users
> off to installing the software. Many people would prefer to run a
> command like `<package manager> install ncl` and move on to using the
> software. Having to register, download and move the tarball into a
> specific directory may relegate NCL and associated Python bindings to
> the "Meh, why bother" category of software.
>
> - More importantly, the absence of an anonymous download makes it more
> difficult to use NCL in environments where servers are deployed and
> provisioned automatically by software such as Chef or Puppet. NCL
> would have to be provided as a pre-downloaded tarball--- a requirement
> that adds complexity to an operation that should be kept as simple as
> possible by having a package manager handle as much as possible as
> automatically as possible.
>
> It appears to me that NCL and friends are distributed under a very
> permissive BSD-style license--- is there some reason they are not
> available for anonymous download as well?
>
> -Charlie
>
> ----------
> Charlie Sharpsteen
> Contributor: Homebrew Package Manager
> http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
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Received on Tue Oct 12 15:22:19 2010