Coot on OpenSuse

[pemsley]

Is there hope for Coot 1.1.08+ on OpenSuse?

If so, what do we need to do to help?

@StefanBruens, I invite your input.

[hsk17]

i have made an attempt, see build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:hsk17:science:coot, though this is more a proof-of-concept.

1. fftw is long gone from the official opensuse distributions (leap, tumbleweed). probably coot should be modified to use fftw3.
2. rdkit needs recent python, and it needs the corresponding boost-python.
   for tumbleweed, ok.
   but for leap, this is a major difficulty, as by design of suse's build process only the boost-python for the main suse-distributed python version is built, which for leap, even the soon-to-be-released leap-15.6, is still python3.6.
   i tried to enhance the boost build such that an additional python3.11 based boost-python gets built, but the maintainers were reluctant to accept the change.

[pemsley]

FFTW is only marginally used by Coot itself. That can be conditionally compiled easily.

FFTW though is a core component of Clipper - so if there is porting to be done it would be done for Clipper.

[hsk17]

ahh, i see. stefan bruens has provided a version of clipper that uses some kiss-fft instead of fftw, see at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/science/clipper

anyway, the major issue to get it built on stable opensuse seems rdkit's need for a recent-python-based boost_python library.