On 08/17/2010 12:20 PM, Steve Jackson wrote:
If MOAB is built with dagmc enabled and CGM support, one of the programs installed in bin/ is cgm2moab, a tool for converting CAD files to MOAB meshes. Over time, almost all the the functionality of this program has migrated into MOAB's native CGM reader, so it's now possible to do essentially everything that cgm2moab does using an appropriate call to mbconvert. (Not a terse or convenient call, though, because cgm2moab specifies a lot of lengthy arguments to ReadCGM.) This has led the dagmc users to consider changing cgm2moab into a wrapper script that calls mbconvert, instead of a C++ program.
I'm wondering what our primary maintainers think about this idea. Can Tim and/or Jason comment on the following possibilities?
* Convert cgm2moab to a python script. (Readability win, requires python, and possibly requires autoconf things to portably detect python.)
I don't think we should add a dependency on python to MOAB for something this minor. I'm also a little unsure about it being a readability win. While python does a little more to force readability, you don't have to write unmaintainable code in other languages (except perhaps for autoconf/m4, which will have to use to add the configure logic.)
* Convert cgm2moab to a plain bash script. (Messier code, but probably more portable.)
I'm not sure it'd really be more portable. Windows users are more likely to have a python interpreter than a bourne shell.
* No thanks, leave it as C++.
This is probably the most portable option. Why do you want to make this change at all? Is there any active development on cgm2moab that would be made easier? Should we just remove the utility? Is it frequently used? It is a lot simpler to use a more specialized utility as opposed to mbconvert, but is there a sufficient number of users to justify maintaining such a utility in MOAB, installing it for all users, etc. as opposed to just letting users write their own wrapper script? - jason