dolfin team mailing list archive

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear DOLFIN developers,

I work in a small computational immunology research group in the Dept
of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University in North
Carolina. We are trying to set up simulation projects, which involve
solving pde's. We are interested in both Petsc and DOLFIN.

I've been trying to install 0.5.7 on Debian. Unfortunately, I've been having 
some difficulties, and I hope you can help.

At least part of the problems I've had involve the installation of Petsci, 
which dolfin has difficulty compiling against.

The structure of the installation of Petsci is quite complicated, but seems to 
consist of 4 directories, namely bin, bmake, include and lib.

For some reason, there are some header files in /bmake/linux-gnu in addition to 
those in include. The compilation had problems locating these include files.

So, my first question is, what kind of Petsci library structure does dolfin 
expect to be compiling against?

There seem to be (at least) two possibilities.

a) Dolfin expects to compile against Petsci sources. I hope not.

b) Dolfin can compile against only the Petsci shared/static libraries and 
header files.

If the latter, where does dolfin expect the directories listed above to be 
located?

Let me know if you want to see a configure log or anything else. This was 
tested on a pretty bare-bones sarge (chrooted) Debian system.

Just a few more questions.

In your estimation, is DOLFIN ready for general usage? The code and design 
looks very good but the documentation is sparse. Are the developers willing to 
answer questions about the details of the library?

I see DOLFIN is currently using Petsc 2.2.1. However, 2.3 is the most recent 
release, and the most recent version packaged for Debian is 2.2.0. Are there 
any plans to switch to using 2.3 in the near future? Do you have any Debian 
packages of more recent versions of Petsci or of DOLFIN available?

Thanks in advance.

                                                                 Faheem.