On Mar 25, 2014, at 10:30 , Ian Hinder <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 25 Mar 2014, at 14:53, Frank Loeffler <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 04:07:35PM -0700, Roland Haas wrote:
>>> According to the minutes from 2013-12-16 a decision was reached:
>> 
>> Thanks for digging this out. This is what I remembered.
>> 
>>> What is not in the notes is that Ian also desired a way to force it to
>>> download so that for cluster where no network connection (or git) is
>>> available at build time (or preparing for a flight) one can force
>>> download on ones laptop then use simfactory to sync the tarballs.
>> 
>> I think we mentioned at least in the call that such a possibility should
>> exist - an option to download all possibly required tarballs.
> 
> The obvious place to store the URL for the tarball is in the 
> configuration.ccl file.  What is the recommended procedure for reading 
> entries from this file outside of the build system?  It would have been nice 
> to find that the Perl files in lib/sbin were Perl modules which could be used 
> outside the build system, but I was disappointed to find this was not the 
> case.  The file is parsed by lib/sbin/ConfigurationParser.pl.

I think we want to move away from building external libraries as part of the 
Cactus build; instead, we want to build them ahead of time, e.g. via 
Simfactory. This has several advantages, such as e.g. that a "make clean" 
doesn't require rebuilding the libraries, and that several Cactus 
configurations can use the same external libraries, and that one can even have 
one power user build the libraries on a system while all others simply use them.

One additional advantage is that building external libraries from within Cactus 
is actually quite difficult, since the Cactus compiler options are often 
"strange" and need to be "cleaned" before one can use them. The respective 
shell code is arcane, and often breaks between different system. Building 
external libraries on their own, independent of Cactus, is much simpler.

I know this because I implemented this in Simfactory3, and I definitively think 
this is the way to go. The current build recipes use Clang (not gcc, and not 
the system's "standard" compiler) for building. I did this because I was 
interested in C++11, and most system compilers (Intel, PGI, older versions of 
GCC, current Nvidia) don't support this. However, in the interest of backward 
compatibility we should probably also provide build recipes for (say) an older 
version of GCC that is supported by all compilers.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <[email protected]>
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/personal/eschnetter/

My email is as private as my paper mail. I therefore support encrypting
and signing email messages. Get my PGP key from http://pgp.mit.edu/.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

_______________________________________________
Users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.einsteintoolkit.org/mailman/listinfo/users

Reply via email to