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====== SOFALite Notes ======

===== Changes from SOFA =====

==== Features ====

=== Removed ===

  * No image processing - leave that up to general tools e.g. screen shotting, printing to PDF from web browser etc
  * No translations - no more _() everywhere, no more packaging .pot files etc, no more having to make strings static
  * No database connectivity - only one place for SQL - SQLite - so no more config, credentials management etc

=== Added ===

  * Support for importing wide format data
  * Much better interface (always one window open with individual dialogs off that)

==== Python ====

Python 3.10 onwards so I can use all the nice new language features e.g. pleasant type hinting, dataclasses etc

===== Dependencies =====

==== Minimalism ====

The fewer the dependencies, and the less they depend on the OS, the easier the packaging.

In SOFA Statistics, dependencies, especially image-processing dependencies, made it very hard to package cross-platform.

Minimum:

  * Python
  * wxPython - for GUI
  * matplotlib - for images that overload SVG / JS based toolkits such as Dojo
  * pandas (inc numpy) - for misc data processing including in core stats engine

==== Installation ====

All dependencies are distro / system dependencies, not pip dependencies (even if we develop in a venv).

This is to make deb packaging easy where we list system dependencies.

wxPython - https://shanemcd.org/2020/05/03/how-to-install-wxpython-in-a-python-virtual-environment-on-debian-buster/

A couple of the key steps (there are others but you may have already done them):

  sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-dev \
    libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev libtiff-dev libnotify-dev \
    freeglut3-dev libsdl1.2-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev

And in venv (when activated):

  pip install wxPython