[GSAS-II] New installation and scripting shortcut issues

[Diogo Fernandes De Almeida]

Hi all,

Apologies in advance for the long e-mail, but I would really appreciate some insight into some issues I've been having.

Since I use the scripting tools extensively, my previous installation of GSAS-II had been through conda using the briantoby::gsas2pkg instructions. It was easier to install the scripting shortcut if I was using the conda environment GSAS-II was installed into to script as well.

With the recent updates to GSAS-II, I tried updating my version through the GUI 'Help' > 'Check for updates' option and got an error message from the Git application. For this reason, I tried reinstalling GSAS-II through conda again (probably a bit too impulsively, I know), by removing the previous environment from conda and re-running the environment-creation and installation instructions, but I ran into a few problems, first with conda not having permissions related to the Menu folder, and then with the internal structure of the GSASII package, and with the fact that for some reason using the start_GSASII.bat script somehow made the working python version switch from the 3.11 of the conda environment to the 3.12 of the base environment. It seems from the "April 2025: Transition from Master to Main Branch" post on the documentation website that work on the conda package version of the software is still underway, so I believe this might be related to that.

If I install GSAS-II using the Windows full installer, it works fine as a standalone application, but I was not able to properly link that installation of GSAS-II to a conda environment by installing the scripting shortcut. I've been able to get around this issue today by using the Windows full installer to install GSAS-II into my conda environments folder, and as you may expect that automatically created a new conda environment with the same name as the folder created.

The only issue I've been having now is that when I try to install the scripting shortcut I run into errors related to relative imports, since the structure has changed to the 'from . import x' format instead of 'import x':
ImportError: attempted relative import with no known parent package
I assume there will be a way around this if I run the scripting shortcut instructions from the correct directory, but I haven't been able to find it. Again, I'm very sorry for taking so long to get to the point, I just thought some context was necessary and that the development team would appreciate some feedback with the transition. To be clear, everything was working fine before I tried to reinstall GSAS-II so the issue doesn't seem to be with the transition, just with the new installation.

Thank you again for taking the time to read this and I would really appreciate any insight you may have!

Best wishes,
Diogo
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