Folks, I recently upgraded my 13.04 system to 13.10 using the update manager. I had only two problems with the update (a bug in the python idle program and some minor difficulty with the network manager applet) but I had a great deal of trouble getting FEniCS working. Mike Welland gave me some excellent advice that I could not do without, too. I would like to share my experiences so others can avoid them.
I had been using FEniCS for a while before the upgrade, going through the "Chapter 3" tutorial, so I had a little bit of experience running it. After the upgrade, and mindful of the warning on the web pages http://fenicsproject.org/download/ubuntu_details.html, I followed the directions there, re-adding the ppa and updating everything. Unfortunately, the very first of the tutorial examples failed with a long error message that, as best as I could tell, indicated that a file was not found. I posted a question on this list and Mike Welland responded with some suggestions, but it was only after I began inserting print statements into some python modules that I was able to discover that the missing file was swig and dolfin was trying to check the version number. Sure enough, swig had not been installed during the upgrade, so I installed it. Following the swig installation, the tutorial exercises got only to the next error: "Exception: Incompatible swig versions detected. UFC swig version is not the same as extension module swig version: '2.0.10' != '2.0.8'" Inexperienced as I am, I did not appreciate the meaning of this error message, and spent some time cleaning fenics off my system and then re-installing it, all to no avail. Finally, after seeing a reference to the "~/.instant" directory in this list, I removed that directory (I guess it contains cached compilations from my earlier runs on 13.04) and, voila, everything works nicely now. As a consequence, I have some suggestions: In the first place, the fenics .deb package should depend on swig, so that swig gets installed when fenics is installed. In addition, a sensible error message when swig is not present would be helpful for inexperienced users. A second suggestion would be to recommend cleaning out the ~/.instant directory after a system upgrade among the other suggestions on the web page referenced above. It might also be possible for instant to add some mention of ~/.instant in its error message about incompatible swig versions. Alternatively, instant (or dolfin) could be configured to recompile instead of throwing an error when the swig version doesn't match. Thanks again to Mike Welland for his help, and to the rest of you who post to this list with helpful comments.
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