On 09/25/2018 08:14 AM, Boud Roukema wrote:
> Dear Cactus developers/users,
>
> I could not find an appropiate place for proposing wishlist items
> for Cactus - please tell me if there is such a place, or add this
> as a new wishlist item.
Normally, it would be https://trac.einsteintoolkit.org/, however,
anonymous users can't do anything at the moment. We've had issues with
spam and our captcha system was inadequate... so I guess emailing this
list is the right thing to do.
Your comments below are worth thinking about. Thanks.
--Steve
>
> WISHLIST: GetComponents --avoid-useless-downloads --propose-system-installs
>
> AIM: reduce download volume by about 40 percent or so; reduce compile time;
> increase likelihood of having wider-software-community-verified versions of
> external libraries
>
> DESCRIPTION:
> In my recent (Sept 2018) download of Cactus, out of about 500 Mb total
> download, I have about 200Mb of downloaded external library source
> packages, most of which either (i) are superfluous because they already
> exist in my OS (Debian GNU/Linux), or (ii) *should* be superfluous,
> since they can more safely be installed using the
> apt/apt-get/aptitude/dpkg package management system. This proposal
> is to add an OS-dependent option to GetComponents that (i) checks if the
> OS is a debian derivative and if yes, then instead of downloading the
> source packages, extracts necessary versioning metadata from the OS,
> inserts this in the appropriate place in the Cactus system for defining
> -I include and -L library shell or makefile variables as appropriate;
> and/or (ii) checks if the OS is a debian derivative and if yes, proposes
> a list of system packages to install as root user that would avoid
> having to download and compile these. Proposed names for the options
> are (i) --avoid-useless-downloads and (ii) --propose-system-installs.
>
> DETAILS:
>
> Superfluous downloads on my system:
>
> du -sh Cactus/arrangements/
> 200M Cactus/arrangements/
>
> ls -l $(find ./Cactus/arrangements/ExternalLibraries -name "*\.t*gz") | awk
> '{b+=$5} END {print "b=",b," Mb=",b/1024/1024}'
>
> b= 101248488 Mb= 96.5581
>
> du -s ./Cactus/arrangements/ExternalLibraries/*/.svn/pristine/* | awk
> '{b+=$1}
> END {print " Mb=",b/1024}'
>
> Mb= 98.5
>
> So it seems to me that 200 Mb (out of 500Mb) total download should have been
> avoided -
> this gets to proposal (i). The compilation of some of these is for proposal
> (ii) - users
> could avoid compiling packages that are better matched to their system using
> their
> native package manager.
>
> [The download was probably, but not certainly, done as per
> https://docs.einsteintoolkit.org/et-docs/Simplified_Tutorial_for_New_Users
> i.e.
>
> curl -O -L
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gridaphobe/CRL/ET_2018_09/GetComponents
>
> chmod u+x GetComponents
>
> ./GetComponents
> https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/manifest/raw/ET_2018_09/einsteintoolkit.th
> ]
>
>
> COMMENTS:
>
> Several of the packages provided by the above install are older than the
> Debian
> stable
> versions, so a counterargument of "but the recommended Cactus source packages
> are
> more up-to-date" does not apply, at least in this case. Debian stable versions
> of
> packages are quite conservative in terms of security support and bug fixing.
>
>
> (i) Politer names for --avoid-useless-downloads could be:
>
> --avoid-redundant-downloads
>
> --avoid-superfluous-downloads # but people are likely to misspell this
>
>
> (ii) My idea for --propose-system-installs is *not* to try to do the
> install, since asking a user to give the root or sudo password seems
> to me unwise, given the whole idea of by default installing Cactus/ET
> in user space. I'm only proposing that the perl script do something like
> output to the user:
>
> # should find something like "libfftw3-dev liblapack-dev libopenmpi-dev
> openssl";
> system_installable = ... # search in Cactus/arrangements/ExternalLibraries/
>
> if(length($system_installable) > 0){
> print("Before doing a full download, you may wish to install the
> following\n
> packages instead of compiling from source, using");
> print(if $OS == debian_derivative ( "aptitude or
> apt-get" else "your package manager:\n"));
> print("$system_installable");
> };
>
>
> I don't really know perl - the above syntax is just a quick guess.
>
> For the same reasons, I'm probably not the best person to propose a patch.
> Cactus+ET have become much easier to install since several years ago -
> these two options could make them even more attractive to newbie users.
>
> Cheers
> Boud
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