On 18 Apr 2014, at 17:52, Mike Sussman <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > Strange. When I check the dependancies via the package manager for 14.04, I see Swig as a required package. Johannes Ring, the maintainer of the packages, should be able to respond. > 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. > Good suggestion. We did discuss this a few years back when the Debian packages were first created. I recall that it’s a Debian policy that packages cannot automatically clean out cache files, so a helpful message to run instant-clean would be in order. Could you register this point as an issue on Bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/fenics-project/dolfin/issues)? > Thanks again to Mike Welland for his help, and to the rest of you who post to > this list with helpful comments. Thanks for the feedback. Garth > _______________________________________________ > fenics-support mailing list > [email protected] > http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics-support _______________________________________________ fenics-support mailing list [email protected] http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics-support
