Unable to install following instructions

[PrestonMcDonald]

It seems impossible to install using the instructions as written. There is no makefile provided, so the required make call just won't ever work. Is there an easier way to use this software? A conda install would be ideal.

[freeseek]

To compile the plugins you have to download the BCFtools source code as explained in the Installation section as it gets compiled using the Makefile in BCFtools. If you have tried that and it did not work for you explain to me what you have done. If you want pre-made binaries you can use those available here but they are only provided for Linux and you will still need to have BCFtools installed separately. Unfortunately I have close to zero experience with conda

[PrestonMcDonald]

Thanks for the response. I see. I was able to get it working with the standalone. The documentation didn't clearly indicate anything about using a makefile provided by bcftools. Or that one needs to completely reinstall bcftools from source in order to use the plugin. It reads as an example of a way to install it assuming bcftools is not already installed. I can't be the only person who tried to get this working with an existing conda installation of the latest bcftools, as that would be far more efficient than installing an entirely new bcftools installation from scratch in parallel to the existing one. The idea of plugging a library into an existing package installation is also sort of implied by the term "plugin". Is it really not possible to get a plugin installed in bcftools without compiling it all together from source? I am probably also not the only person trying to do this on a cluster computing environment where local user storage is limited in size and number of files making multiple, redundant installations of the same software problematic.

[freeseek]

The plugin infrastructure of BCFtools requires the BCFtools source code (not the binaries) to compile. The best resources to understand how the BCFtools plugin infrastructure works are the API here and this example plugin here. The Installation section does state that you have to be in the BCFtools source code directory to compile the plugin. What is the reason you cannot use the pre-compiled binaries here?

[PrestonMcDonald]

As I said, I did use the standalone. They work fine.