Chimera starts with no tools

[Tom Goddard]

About half the time Chimera starts with just a black graphics area and no tools (no command-line) and nothing in the Tools menu. This started happening yesterday. Sometimes doing a make fixes the problem, sometimes doing a make causes the problem -- it seems to be related to the order that files are written to disk in the build!

Some debugging revealed that the determining factor in whether any tools appear is the order that toolshed finds the tools.

[Tom Goddard]

The tools always appear if I put a line to sort them by name in

core/toolshed/init.py

in _scan_installed() replacing

for d in self._inst_path.get_distributions():

with

dists = list(self._inst_path.get_distributions())
dists.sort(key = lambda d: str(d))
for d in dists:

If I reverse this sorted lists, the tools never appear.

I don't know why the order should matter. Possibly the order is related to doing a Python listdir() to read a directory.

[Conrad Huang]

Tested all three versions: looping over

• unsorted entries,
• sorted by name, and
• reverse sorted by name.

All three versions worked. Probably fixed by all the code reorganization for toolshed since October 2015.