Aesthetic fixes

[coldfix]

This pull request contains some minor changes to mainly setup.py. Still, you might not agree with everything: dropping distutils as an alternative to setuptools. I believe this improves stability since setuptools is needed anyways as it provides the pkg_resources module required for the resource.package module. In the spirit of failing as early as possible. Don't hesitate to drop any of the changes if you see this differently.

Furthermore, I'd like to/suggest to:

• upgrade the version number more often when merging into master (to be able to bind my application more reliably)
• upload the package to PyPI to be able to easily install it via pip
• move contents of the src folder to the top level folder of the repository
• remove merged branches from the repository and merge unmerged branches for greater clarity

what do you think about those?

Best regards,

Thomas

[Eothred]

Assume this works on Windows as well (have no testing machines atm). Was not aware that you could use ~ on Windows, very practical!

[coldfix]

According to the expanduser documentation this is usable as a normalization between windows and unix. I had no problems on windows so far.

[Eothred]

• upgrade the version number more often when merging into master (to be able to bind my application more reliably) All in favour, feel free to bump the minor version numbers as often as you want. For the major version I would (ideally) like to have some kind of roadmap for each major version, so we have a bit of documentation of what the versions differ by.
• upload the package to PyPI to be able to easily install it via pip All in favour, have just not figured out how to do this in a good manner (note, including the fact that most people don't build Mad-X via cmake, hence don't have libmadx installed). On a related note, if you see better ways to write the setup script, feel free to modify. I am no expert in these matters...
• move contents of the src folder to the top level folder of the repository Hmm, I am a bit unsure about this. Kajetan used Eclipse for developing, which favours having a src/ folder for the code (I believe). Let me think a bit longer about this one.
• remove merged branches from the repository and merge unmerged branches for greater clarity Removing merged branches makes sense (in particular the older ones). For unmerged branches, some are unmerged for a reason (e.g. the branch pymadx_maiba which is a placeholder for the code Masamitsu gave me)

[coldfix]

Thanks.

I just deleted the merged branches and upgraded the minor version number. Also don't forget to create a tag when updating the version number.

The src/ directory issue certainly is not top priority. Sometimes I felt like it would be more convenient and might enable testing more easily with the working-directory package without installing it system-wide. But using virtualenv for boxed installations also works fine.

Im no expert either with python packaging. Especially when it comes to non-python dependencies, there seems to be no nice standard solution available. I looked a bit into buildout and some alternatives but I did not find anything really appealing. If you don't mind I will upload a PyPI package anyway. This makes it somewhat easier to install PyMAD without needing to clone the package from git first.

[Eothred]

Yes, sure, go ahead and try out pypi. Note that there is already a package pymad there, so maybe you want to choose a name like cern-pymad, pymad-madx or similar.

For testing without systemwide installation, I use the PYTHONPATH environment variable. This is searched before system paths, so if set to src/build/lib.../ You will use whatever you have there. See also test/run_tests.cmake which does this automatically for the nightly builds. I think this should also work on Windows (?)

[coldfix]

Oh thanks! I will have a look.