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Re: Can you get a package back to a notebook easily?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg82923] Re: Can you get a package back to a notebook easily?
• From: Thomas E Burton <tburton at brahea.com>
• Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 03:30:09 -0500 (EST)

No, reading a package into the front end as a notebook is  
unsatisfactory: you get back only initialized input cells, in rather  
poor condition, and everything else is lost. Why bother? The reverse  
is true: you can easily reconstruct a package from a notebook.

> I am asking this because I want to know if I need to save my  
> notebook and my package in CVS, or only my package?

Back in the old days (version 3?), notebooks would become unstable  
when ported between operating systems (Mac and Windows in my case). I  
think Wolfram is well beyond this issue now, but I remain skittish.  
No way am I going to trust a notebook to an IDE like CVS. So what I  
do is sync the packages into the IDE and store the notebooks  
elsewhere. (I keep four copies of important notebooks! Two on  
computers, one on local backup, one on remote backup.) If the IDE  
fouls up, I can easily recreate versions of the packages from my  
notebooks.

One compromise with this approach is that I don't keep all versions  
of all notebooks. (My notebooks are typically 2-100 megabytes each.)  
So the selection of saved notebooks will not always correspond  
exactly to the sync'ed packages, but I get away with it.

Tom