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BrainVISA support and future

Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2020 3:45 pm
by francois
Dear colleagues,

Is there still some resource available for the support of BrainVISA?
Are there clear plans to keep on updating this software in the future?
Or should we start porting the BrainVISA-based tools to a different platform?

The last release from 2018 (4.6.1) still lacks some critical patches for the distribution of IntrAnat (https://f-tract.eu/software/intranat/).
It still doesn't work on Windows 10 (which is already 5y old), and if nothing gets updated I guess it will also start having problems with newer versions of Linux distributions.

Thanks
François

Re: BrainVISA support and future

Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2020 11:06 am
by riviere
Hi,
Brainvisa is not dead but we struggle to perform maintenance and releases. We are not many people working on it and we have difficulties to handle system compatibilities for every system / distribution. That's why we will release the next version of brainvisa as a container or (and) virtual machine image, containing a linux system. Native execution will not be supported any longer, it's too much work. Sources should still be compatible with windows and mac systems (at least at first) but we cannot handle packaging for all systems any longer. We are currently working on this next release.
You can take a look at casa-distro in the meantime.

Re: BrainVISA support and future

Posted: Thu Nov 19, 2020 3:16 pm
by francois
Thanks for the updates.

We need to plan our next BrainVISA-based developments (if any).
Does this mean that in the future, we'll download a virtual machine in which we'll be able to install our development environment and execute IntrAnat?
Do you have an approximate timeline for this future VM release?

Re: BrainVISA support and future

Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2020 11:17 am
by riviere
Yes the next distribution will be VM-based, using either Singularity or VirtalBox (both will be supported, maybe docker later).
It will be possible to build another image with added libraries and toolboxes, but the modular distribution as it was using the installer will be lost, because VM images do not allow such a modularity. Anyway the modular aspect was never used by users, nor by toolboxes developers, and was very very heavy to maintain.
We are still working on it, we initially wanted to release a new version this automn, but as you can see we did not manage to do it so far. We hope we will do it in january or febuary. Difficult to make promises since we are not a full developers team and have many jobs to do...
Denis