[chimera-dev] automatic checkForChanges

[Eric Pettersen]

I'd like to suggest that chimera.openModels.{open,add,close} all 
automatically run chimera.update.checkForChanges() as they finish 
(suppressable by supplying a 'checkForChanges=False' keyword argument 
to the functions).  Right now, developers who aren't "in the know" will 
write scripts that loop through structures, opening and closing them 
and performing operations, and because they don't know to call 
checkForChanges the scripts will typically fail due to running out of 
memory.  Also, some other operations (surfacing) will fail if 
checkForChanges isn't called after a model is opened.

There are other times when checkForChanges needs to run, but those are 
relatively rare compared to these openModels functions.  It seems to me 
that making this change makes normal scripting less error-prone while 
allowing for the uncommon case of wanting to suppress the 
checkForChanges.

Opinions?

                         Eric Pettersen
                         UCSF Computer Graphics Lab
                         pett at cgl.ucsf.edu
                         http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu