[CIG-MC] CitcomS Python Removal

[Eric Heien]

Hello,

The CitcomS developers have recently decided to remove Python and Pyre support from CitcomS.  There are several reasons for this:

- The Python interface in CitcomS is not compatible with Python 2.7 or above.  Python 2.7 was released in 2010, meaning most systems set up in the last 3 years won’t support Python in CitcomS.
- The interface requires downloading extra packages - this happens automatically but can cause compilation failure on some platforms.
- The interface opaquely assigns some parameters with values not controlled by the user.
- The Python interface adds a level of complexity making it harder to debug the program and understand how data structures are used/modified during a run.
- Many of the major CitcomS users do not use the Python interface.

We plan to remove this functionality from CitcomS and provide tools to convert Python based input files to the normal input file format.  Relevant logic that was in the Python framework will be moved into the main CitcomS code.  This change will be implemented over the coming year and incorporated into a future CitcomS release.

If you have any concerns about this decision or would like to weigh in, feel free to contact me or the cig-mc mailing list.

Thank you,

-Eric