Q about integration with SPM8

[Vladimir Litvak]

Although what Robert described (deleting the private subdirectories)
will do the trick, I don't see any reason to do it. I do see a reason
not to do it because it may generate errors that will be very hard for
us to reproduce and resolve. We are now often developing things in
parallel where changes are made to FT to make some SPM feature work so
if the two get slightly out of sync those new features will not work.
Thus, I repeat my recommendation to leave things as they are. Don't
you agree, Robert?

There might be some problems with clashes if Robert starts naming some
FT functions with the same names as wrappers in SPM. I don't know if
there are any cases like this already.

Vladimir



On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Robert Oostenveld
<r.oostenveld at fcdonders.ru.nl> wrote:
> 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
>
> ----------------------------------
> The aim of this list is to facilitate the discussion between users of the
> FieldTrip  toolbox, to share experiences and to discuss new ideas for MEG
> and EEG analysis. See also
> http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/fieldtrip.html and
> http://www.ru.nl/fcdonders/fieldtrip.
>
>

----------------------------------
The aim of this list is to facilitate the discussion between users of the FieldTrip  toolbox, to share experiences and to discuss new ideas for MEG and EEG analysis. See also http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/fieldtrip.html and http://www.ru.nl/fcdonders/fieldtrip.