Some remarks about installation instructions

Hello.

I am one of the reviewers of the JOSS submission. I encountered slight problems while I was installing the package and I have some quick remarks about the instructions.

In README.md, there are contradictory statements about the binary_c version needed to use binary_c-python, making things a bit confusing:

The current release is version version, and is designed and tested to work with binary_c version 2.2.1 (for older or newer versions we can't guarantee correct behaviour).

To run this code you need to at least have installations of:

  • Python 3.7 or higher (3.6 is EOL, and we are using 3.9 for development)
  • binary_c version 2.2.0 or higher

Adding to that confusion, the version 0.9.4 on the PyPI repository is not the same as the version 0.9.4 on the master branch of this repository. You can use binary_c 2.2.2 with the latter, but you cannot install the former (as it is not in the list of accepted versions here). Also, assuming I want to install binary_c v2.2.1 to comply with the first statement above, it is difficult to distinguish which branch I should take in the binary_c repo. I installed versions 0.9.4/2.2.2 with this script available in the binary_c repo but I am still not very sure if they are compatible with each other in the end.

By the way, I found the above-mentioned script very useful to install everything. I tend to think it would be interesting to have it mentioned somewhere in the installation instructions. Or, perhaps, have a link to the installation instructions of binary_c available here.