Like any successful open-source project, PyMOL has incorporated numerous ideas, inputs, and code from the user and developer communities.
However, for practical reasons, we must limit the scope of its coverage to the set of PyMOL features and capabilities that it can reasonably expect to support and maintain.
Generally speaking, in order for a PyMOL feature to be fully supported, it must be:
The third point is crucial with regard to open-source contributions to PyMOL. If a given enhancement is too large, too complex, or too hard to maintain in terms of its source code, then it must remain unsupported, even if it widely used.
A few examples of supported PyMOL features include:
Everything that does not meet the criteria above should be considered unsupported. However, that does not mean that such features should not be used. It just must means that your expectations in using them need to be different than when using supported features.
Assistance with unsupported features is still likely to be available on the PyMOL Users mailing list or on the PyMOL Wiki.
Popular unsupported features in PyMOL include:
Schrödinger is committed to developing, maintaining, and supporting its precompiled PyMOL builds (Incentive Products), thus delivering clear value to project sponsors in the form of greater ease and convenience as compared to the open-source code. Therefore, compilation from source code is not an officially supported activity.
However, we do wish to encourage and enable open-source use of PyMOL, and especially so on open-source operating systems and environments. Thus, we welcome interactions regarding compilation of PyMOL from source code under the Linux and FreeBSD platforms.