On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 6:51 PM, Anders Logg <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 11:42:46AM +0100, Johannes Ring 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.
>>
>> 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.
>
> Sounds very interesting! I didn't know you had come so far to have
> already used it on FEniCS.
>
> I have hashdist installed and the hashstack downloaded. How do I
> proceed to build/install FEniCS - what are the magic commands?

First, make sure the HashDist 'hit' tool is in your PATH:

  export PATH=/path/to/hashdist/bin:$PATH

Then, in the hashstack folder, copy one of the FEniCS profiles in the
examples folder:

  cd hashstack
  cp examples/fenics-dev.debian.yaml default.yaml

Modify default.yaml for your needs and run 'hit build' to start
building. When it is done, try importing DOLFIN:

  ./default/bin/python -c "import dolfin"

If that works, add 'default/bin' to PATH and 'default' to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:

  export PATH=$PWD/default/bin:$PATH
  export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$PWD/default:$CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH

That should be it. No need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or PYTHONPATH (at
least on Linux).

Johannes

> --
> Anders
>
>
>> 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].
>>
>> [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.
>> >
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