make bare-bones readers MDAnalysis-independent #1194
Description
In the long run it would be useful to move forward with making trajectory readers MDAnalysis-independent. @kain88-de has already done this for the Gromacs XDR reader. What I mean by this is that someone else could, in principle, use lib.formats and then use it independently from MDA itself.
Why?
Because between MDAnalysis, mdtraj, pytraj, VMD … we are duplicating code and that's a waste of time and bad software engineering. It would be much better if (eventually) we (the community) have bare-bones readers and then everyone else can use them as part of their library. Generally, people liked that idea, judging from my interactions with others at meetings. Certainly, something like this is not happening overnight but we could take a leadership role and start by moving some of our readers/writers into lib.format. We would then be ready to move forward if we wanted to.
A GSOC project related to trajectory formats could be to
- formally define the api (basically, numpy arrays or array_like)… follow the Gromacs XDR code
- move some/all readers/writers to lib.format
See also https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mdnalysis-devel/QlwoL1_Etns/cqAZRrp0FwAJ