As some of you might know, Garth Wells, Lizao Li and I have been working on virtual environments for portable and reusable distribution of FEniCS. This work is in garth-wells/fenics-virtual mainly under the docker branch.
The hashdist effort provides an excellent, simple and consistent cross-platform way of building FEniCS. Nonetheless, I do not think it provides: a) a really, really easy environment for absolute beginners on Windows. b) a completely consistent environment for; teaching, repeatability of results, cross-platform use within a research group. c) a method for quickly moving the same environment from the users computer to a cluster environment. However, I think that together the two projects should complement each other nicely. Within the fenics-virtual project we essentially have our own set of build scripts, but it seems sensible to me to re-write at least some of our virtual environments to use the new Hashdist scripts. More specifically, Docker stable-ppa and vagrant stable-ppa would continue to use the PPA archives, and Docker developer and stable-src would move to using Hashdist. The two options are: 1) Bring the re-written garth-wells/fenics-virtual under fenics-project and keep fenics-developer-tools separate. Simple! 2) Bring the functionality of fenics-virtual directly into fenics-developer-tools. The advantage of this is that users and developers can immediately see all of the ways we offer for using FEniCS. The downside is it introduces complexity. My personal opinion is to go for option 1) for simplicity and separability of the two efforts. Let me know what you think! Cheers, Jack _______________________________________________ fenics mailing list [email protected] http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics
