Frequently Asked Questions

It has a GPLv3 license.

I strongly recommended you to subscribe to the ViTables users' group and ask for help there. If you are lucky, some subscriber will be able to help you. It's also worth to check the messages posted to the group before sending your question: maybe your problem was solved by someone in the past.

You should report it, of course :-). Send your report to the ViTables users' group or use the bug tracker.

If you want to run the development version of ViTables, first of all you have to clone it from the Mercurial repository. For instance:

$ hg clone http://hg.berlios.de/repos/vitables vitables_tip

will download the latest revision and put it in the vitables_tip directory. Next you have to build the ViTables package from sources and install it. Although it is not difficult, it can be tricky because xsltproc and fop are required to build the documentation. So you need xsltproc and fop installed in your computer.

But there is one more choice for you. In order to make user's life easier I've added the resources module to the repository (a python module that contains, among other things, the documention in HTML format). This is dirty as it is a generated file and should not be under a revision control system, but this way you can run ViTables from the sources folder, without installing it. In order to do it, you have to:

• change to the directory where you have downloaded the ViTables sources
• copy the file scripts/vitables into your current directory with the name vitables.py. Don't create a symbolic link, it will not work
• execute $ python vitables.py

and ViTables should start.

They are not since version 2.0. The installer contains the ViTables sources, examples and documentation (in both HTML and PDF formats). That's all.

ViTables is built on top of a big pyramid of software. Including all the required software in the installer would make its size really huge. IMHO this is unnecessary, the vast majority of people willing to install ViTables are PyTables users, so they have most of software prerequisites already installed. And not including the PyQt4 libraries doesn't penalise users with lots of extra work as there is a nice Windows installer for them.

Unfortunately I cannot provide much assistance on this subject because I've not Mac OS X platforms available. A step by step guide for installing ViTables (and its prerequisites) on Mac OS X follows (the original source is here)

• install the Python 2.5 universal installer
• install the NumPy 1.2.1 universal installer
• install the HDF5 libraries
• install the Qt4.4 libraries
• install the PyQt4.4 libraries
• install the PyTables 2.x
• finally, install ViTables.

In theory, you can install ViTables as a native application by running $ ./macosxapp/make.sh but I cannot grant it works.

If the above doesn't help your best bet is to ask for help to the ViTables users group.