easier access to ace_fit.jl

[gelzinyte]

Currently, to access the command line fitting script, users would have to execute

julia $HOME/.julia/packages/ACE1pack/ChRvA/scripts/ace_fit.jl -p params.yml

But afaik users shouldn't need to fiddle with the package directories and there might be multiple corresponding to multiple versions of the package.

Is there a way to make ace_fit.jl more visible or accessible?

Python has "console scripts" where you can give a name to an executable which is a short-hand for executing a script. For example instead of

python $HOME/workflow/wfl/cli/cli.py --help

can just do wfl --help.

I couldn't find a Julia equivalent?

Alternatively, maybe there's a way to, when adding ACE1pack, export the path to scripts directory somehow? So that julia ace_fit.jl -p params.yml works?

There's PackageCompiler, which might be useful so that users-only don't even need to install julia & packages, but for this simple problem it seems an overkill.

[wcwitt]

This is a good point, and relevant for distributed fitting where one is forced to use the command line (e.g., mpirun -np 10 mpi_ace_fit.jl).

[gelzinyte]

@bernstei pointed out that we can just add #!/usr/bin/env julia at the top of the script. That's of little help if we can't make the script into an executable and add to PATH at the time of package installation. Though maybe if we add these instructions to the documentation telling people to do this once as they install ACE1pack, it would be somewhat more convenient, because it would be possible to just call ace_fit.jl (rename to ace_fit?) without worrying about the full path. Though that'd need to be updated with every package update...

[wcwitt]

Not the most elegant, but is it possible something like julia -e "using ACE1pack; acefit()" --extra_params would work with a little reconfiguring?

[wcwitt]

Maybe this Comonicon.jl

https://discourse.julialang.org/t/tooling-for-julia-command-line-scripts/73915

Update: there's now a 1.0 release https://discourse.julialang.org/t/comonicon-1-0-release-probably-the-best-cli-generator-in-julia/86122