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FAQs
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This page collects frequently asked questions pertaining to NWChemEx's Design.

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Overall Design
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Why So Many Repos?
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When transitioning from developing a more traditional electronic structure
package to NWChemEx, one of the first observations developers make is that there
are a lot of repos. The motivation behind this is a separation of concerns and
to enforce a decoupled nature to the source code. Each repo is designed to be a
reusable component. It is our hope that such a code factorization will
facilitate adoption of these components by other codes. Even if our components
are never adopted by other codes, a component-based design still benefits us by
making it easier to refactor if need be.


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General
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So Where's "NWChemEx"?
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Having a bunch of individual repos is great for developers, but confusing to
users. Users only need to build the ``NWChemEx`` repo. Building this repo will
build all dependencies which are required to have the complete NWChemEx
electronic structure package. The result of building ``NWChemEx`` is a set of
Python bindings. There is no "NWChemEx" executable, rather users use the Python
module.