Update Manager

NOTE: As of May 29, 2009, the mien svn and web repositories have moved. Earlier versions of the updater default to using a web repository at "cns.montana.edu" that is now deprecated. Instead, use "http://mien.msu.montana.edu/repository". You can change this setting by running the updater GUI (mien -a up), selecting File->preferences, and editing the "repository" field. While you are there, you probably want to switch the "Rev" field from "stable" to "dev". The stable releases tend to rather out of date, and not really that much more stable than the dev releases.

As of revision 553, MIEN is self-updating. You can use the command mien -a up to launch a GUI update manager, or you can use mien --update to automatically (and non-interactively) update MIEN and any installed blocks.

On most systems, the updater will require root privileges, so on a Mac OS X or Ubuntu box, you will need to launch it with sudo mien -a up. The updater needs to be able to the directory where MIEN and mienblocks are installed. Often this is Python's site package directory, which can't be written to by normal users. If you give yourself write access to the site-packages directory, then you won't need to run the updater as root.

The updater will not update code that is part of a subversion working copy, so if you got mien, or any blocks, with subversion, don't use the updater. Instead use svn up mien to update code with subversion.

Within the GUI update manager you can use File->Preferences or the Edit Config button to set up your repository access information. Choices include:

• BlockInstall: the directory in which to install new extension blocks, usually one of the Python site-packages directories or $HOME/mienblocks

• Rev: The revision level to install, alwaves "dev" (development code) or "stable" (somewhat tested code)

• Warnings: "on" or "off". If "on", the UI will warn you when you have several conflicting version management systems managing the same package (e.g. apt and MIEN).

• Repository: The url of the web repository. Currently http://mien.msu.montana.edu/repository is the only repository maintained by the MIEN project, but if you build your own, you can enter it here (and some day we may add mirrors).

Use Scan Repository to check for updates or available blocks. This will give you a list of all available packages, your local version, and the version in your selected repository. It will also select new or updated packages by default.

You may select packages in the list by clicking on them, shift-clicking or control-clicking (command-clicking on Mac) to select multiple packages, or using Select All. The remaining functions, Show Descriptions, Install/Update, and Remove act on the selected packages.

Use Show Descriptions to open a text window with a brief description of the selected blocks.

Use Install/Update to update any selected packages that are out of date, and install any selected blocks that are not yet installed.

Use Remove to delete the local copy of an installed block that you don't want (this can be useful if you are sick of seeing a lot of error messages to the effect that you can't load that block because some dependancy is broken or missing).

After making changes, you will need to restart MIEN.

Once you have used the GUI once to set up your repository info and install the blocks you want, you shouldn't need to use it again. Just use mien --update to keep everything up to date. mien --version will report the versions of the core MIEN code, any installed blocks, and the primary dependancies (Python, Numpy, wxPython, and PyOpenGL).

If you are on a non-gui system, you can still get an interactive update manager from a command line interface. Start mien in interactive text mode with mien -t, and enter the command updater(). The interface is somewhat cumbersome, but it will still allow you to set up your repository info and install blocks. This is usually useful when configuring a remote server (which may not have a GUI environment, or may not be able to export it efficiently over ssh) to act as a distributed computation server for MIEN.