Q about integration with SPM8

[Robert Oostenveld]

Hi John,

Vladimir and I (and other spm developers) have considered this
carefully, and the present spm8+fieldtrip mixture was the best we
could come up with. The versions are automatically kept in synch, but
the release schedule of fieldtrip is daily, whereas for spm8 it is
less frequent. So the versions getting slightly out of sync on your
computer is inevitable.

With the latest 2008a and 2008b versions of Matlab there are better
options for supporting such mixtures ofg packages (using
"namespaces"), but since both spm and fieldtrip should work on older
matlab versions, we cannot use those features yet.

On 9 Jan 2009, at 19:31, Vladimir Litvak wrote:

>> To avoid this issue,
>> I was planning to have SPM8 use my existing Fieldtrip installation
>> exclusively. Is there is any downside to this?
>
> Yes because there is no guarantee that your particular FT version is
> compatible with your SPM version (unless you keep updating both which
> is redundant).
>
> The best way for you to work if you already have an FT version that
> works for you and don't want to update it for a while is to ignore the
> FT version that SPM uses and pretend it's not there. Wrappers will
> prevent any clashes as I explained.

To add on Vladimirs comment: In practice it means that you delete the
spm8/external/fieldtrip/private directory and keep the spm8/external/
fieldtrip directory for the wrappers. You can do the same for fileio
and forwinv (also both in fieldtrip and spm8/external). Subsequently
you should ensure that the ft_xxx wrappers in spm8, respectively the
fileio_xxx and the forwinv_xxx wrappers are on your matlab path, just
as your normal fieldtrip version. SPM8 will call those wrappers, which
will call your standard fieldtrip functions.

best
Robert

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