What's the role of python_packages?

[Noe Nieto]

Hi!

I was browsing the examples/ directory and found that some of them have a symlink to python_packages directory in the root directory of the devsim source code.

Looks to me that it is a support library, but out of the ds.* namespace, Is there a reason why is that so?

-- Noe

[Juan E. Sanchez]

Hi,

The ds namespace is implemented in C++, and statically linked to
executables. The commands are shared by the devsim (python 2),
devsim_py3 (python 3), and devsim_tcl (Tcl) interpreters. Tcl was the
original interpreter, and there are some examples in the testing directory.

The device physics is implemented mostly via scripts.

The python_packages module provides a library to implement some of the
physical models and algorithms shared by many of the examples. It is
written in Python 2.

I believe most of the scripts can be converted using 2to3, if you would
like to use the scripts with the Python 3 interpreter.

The symlinks are there so that it is not necessary to set PYTHONPATH to
the root directory. This trick works on Linux and Mac OS X, but not on
Windows.

I suppose it would be better to set PYTHONPATH, and remove the symlinks.
Please let me know your thoughts on this issue.

Regards,

Juan