On Thu, 6 Nov, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Johannes Ring <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Anders Logg <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
One thing I think is missing on our web page is a collection of good
installation recipes and, possibly, other FEniCS-related recipes.
We do have good binary packages, but instructions for building from
source could be better. Here are some issues I think we need to
solve:
1. How do we want to continue to support Dorsal? Is anyone actively
maintaining it? Should it be the officially supported way to install
FEniCS from source on all platforms, including Mac?
No, Dorsal is not actively maintained. Many package files and platform
files are not particular up to date.
Agree, and I don't think that supporting Dorsal is feasible. The
variety and variability of platforms is too great.
I have been working for a while on HashDist [1] and I have
successfully used it to install FEniCS on Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL6/7,
Mac, Windows (Cygwin) and on two different clusters (Abel and SciNet).
HashDist is better than Dorsal in many ways: it has caching of builds,
it handles dependencies between packages, it is reproducible, it is
customizable, it will get support for binary builds, and it is
actively maintained/developed. Currently, HashDist does not detect
your platform like Dorsal does, or create a conf file that can be
sourced to set environment variables, so it might not be as easy as
Dorsal for FEniCS newcomers. However, this will likely improve in the
future.
It would be great if someone else than me could try to build FEniCS
using HashDist. Please don't hesitate to send comments, suggestions or
report issues. For those interested, there is also an introduction to
HashDist at [2].
Nice - I look forward to trying it out.
[1] https://hashdist.github.io/
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wviHkzk0AkY
Johannes
2. The installation instructions on the web page are very static and
difficult to keep up-to-date, since it requires making a pull
request
for the website Sphinx code, getting someone to apply the pull
request
etc.
3. Is there a good alternative in the form of a collection of
"FEniCS
recipes", to which anyone can contribute (perhaps wiki style),
ideally
also in combination with some voting mechanism (thumbs up = works
for
me) so that we may organically keep track of, say, the best way of
the day to build FEniCS on OS X.
Ideally, we would host this on fenicsproject.org, but perhaps there
are already existing web services that could be used?
4. Could those installation recipes be made scriptable? And then how
would this be different from Dorsal? I like Dorsal, but it seems not
everyone is on board with using Dorsal as the main/official way of
FEniCS installation.
I suggest that we support 'official' scripted installations for the
latest version of Ubuntu. There can be (i) an apt-get version, (ii) a
stable version build, and (iii) a dev version. I suggest these three
because this is what we'll support in the Docker/Vagrant approach
(https://bitbucket.org/garth-wells/fenics-virtual). Via Docker/Vagrant,
the scripts can be tested by anyone independently of their host OS.
An advantage of a limited number of 'official' scripts is that they can
be a template (to read) for those installing on other platforms. Simple
scripted installation for HPC systems is not viable because users don't
have root access, and the machines are too varied and are usually very
different beasts from the nominal installed distribution.
For OSX, I'd like to see FEniCS in Homebrew Science
(https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-science). A downside of this is
that some of the Homebrew packages on which DOLFIN depends are rather
limited, e.g. Homebrew PETSc isn't configured with a decent LU solver.
More generally, we could ease the burden of installing Python packages
by having good pip support.
Garth
--
Anders
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