How to indicate to user that an update of the GSAS-II binaries is needed?

[briantoby]

The GSAS-II binaries are installed when GSAS-II is initially installed. If the binaries are updated, they will not be reinstalled. There needs to be some way to either automatically trigger or manually trigger an update of the binaries.

Seems that this would be best incorporated into the git update process, but how to know that the binary files have been updated?

[kif]

I don't think it is a good practice that a piece of software auto-updates itself.
It is against the FAIR principle, i.e. one should be able to reproduce old results ... and developers should be able to reproduce bugs (to fix them) .

The python environment got much cleaner and deploying extensions is no more has hard as it used to be in the past.

[briantoby]

All GSAS-II updates of the Python code are done only at the request of the user; never automatically. Also, we have always offered the capability to users via the GUI to regress to older versions of the software, to confirm that results are unchanged by version. I'm proud of this.

The focus of this issue has to do with the small amount of non-Python code that most people will install from binariy files that we supply (source code is always distributed of course). This code does not change very much, but the compiled images used to be part of the svn repo and thus were synced to the versioning. They are now placed in a release area on GitHub and for most users will be installed once only when GSAS-II is initially downloaded. There is no mechanism to trigger updating of these routines (or regression to older versions).

The issue here is a desire to sync the binaries to the user-selected version of the Python and source code files. The intent here is that when we add a new capability (or bug fix) via a change in non-Python code, we want to get that out. An example would be that we recently added a capability for searching for magnetic k-vectors that can be greatly sped up via a Cython routine, but just doing a normal git update (from command line or GUI) will only get the source code for that. At present, for most users, to get the compiled version installed, one must do a fresh install.

[briantoby]

This needs to be considered as part of the binary build process, which addressed in PR #40, which is waiting for input from @tacaswell