dolfin team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 03:38:43PM -0400, Harish Narayanan wrote:
> Anders Logg wrote:
> > It has become obvious that the installation of various FEniCS packages
> > (most notably DOLFIN and dependencies) is an obstacle for many users.
> >
> > Maybe it's time we provide a binary (+headers) distribution of the
> > collection of FEniCS packages that is *very* simple to set up?
> >
> > This would include all the FEniCS packages (DOLFIN, FErari, FFC, FIAT,
> > Ko, Puffin) and any non-standard dependencies (PETSc, uBLAS, libxml2,
> > MPI, UMFPACK, SLEPc etc).
> >
> > The process of building the package could be semi-automated and the
> > package would be named FEniCS (fenics) with a version number of its
> > own.
> >
> > Any thoughts?
> >
> > Anyone wants to help building the package?
> >
> > /Anders
> >   
> I've read this entire thread over the past few days and I am going to 
> attempt a solution based on the GAR ports system[1]. It will not be 
> distributed as a binary, but a rule-set to download sources and compile 
> them for different architectures. I have been curious to try it, and 
> this seems to be as good an opportunity as any other.
> 
> This is similar to the scripts you mention later on in the thread, 
> except based on an existing framework. If not anything, though I don't 
> have access to Windows to try them out, I can help out by putting your 
> scripts through (the peculiar) Mac OS X and submitting diffs.
> 
> Harish

Sounds great.

We will need both: a binary package that is very very simple to
install and a tool that automatically downloads and builds the binary
packackage (possibly based on GAR).

/Anders