Hello all,

My name is Juan Luis Cano, I'm studying a MSc in Aerospace Engineering in
Madrid and I started recently to play with FEniCS for my final degree
project. For my day to day work I am using a virtualized Linux Mint and
everything works like a charm thanks to the Ubuntu PPA, but as it is not
the distribution which I normally use I tried to build a conda package
these holidays.

I noticed there are a couple of build systems out there (dorsal, hashdist)
but, as the Anaconda distribution[1] is getting popular in the scientific
Python world these days, I really wanted to try to provide FEniCS packages
for it (at least in Linux). For those who don't know it, Anaconda's package
manager, conda, is open source[2] and provides a nice build system[3].

You can try out my progress so far with a Linux 64 bit box and a Python 2.7
environment:

$ conda create --name py27 python=2.7
$ source activate py27
(py27)$ conda install fenics --channel juanlu001

The build process itself was painful because I knew very little about
FEniCS dependencies a week ago but right now I managed to run the
`demo_poisson.py` (_without_ plotting, see below). The results seem OK from
Paraview.

The good thing is that I made the builds in an Ubuntu Server box but it
works the same in an Arch Linux machine too. I didn't try to compile it
against PETSc, Trilinos and such yet because I wanted some feedback from
the community first, and know if this is something useful for anybody!

The trick here was avoiding the Ubuntu packages (via apt-get) and compile
the dependencies in the form of conda packages themselves. I did such with
boost and suitesparse, for instance[4]. This way there are no linking
problems across different Linux distros. I am stuck with VTK though because
it seems to look for libGL.so, which in turn pulls from X11... and
everythings gets messy very quickly[5].

So if I can get some feedback about how does this work in others'
computers, if this is any useful and which packages should I try to build
next that would be great. Anybody can reproduce the build process using my
conda-recipes fork.

Kind regards and happy new year!

Juan Luis

[1] https://store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda
[2] https://github.com/conda/
[3] http://conda.pydata.org/docs/build.html
[4] https://binstar.org/juanlu001/
[5]
https://github.com/Juanlu001/conda-recipes/commit/a18cedc56e330ba09961b8ddaeb86f580e22f3cc
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