dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Hake <hake@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 27 September 2009 20:55:07 Garth N. Wells wrote:
> Johan Hake wrote:
> > On Sunday 27 September 2009 20:18:07 Garth N. Wells wrote:
> >> Johan Hake wrote:
> >>> On Sunday 27 September 2009 19:49:09 Garth N. Wells wrote:
> >>>> Where's the appropriate place in the build system to test for the
> >>>> version number of external libraries? Is it in dolfin/SConscript
> >>>> (using the simula-scons function 'checkVersion')?
> >>>
> >>> I do not think we have any defined sections in SConstruct/SConscript
> >>> where this should be done. We have used checkVersion to check for the
> >>> swig version some years ago... It is still there as out-commented code
> >>> in the SConscript file.
> >>>
> >>> I think the function just compare a version string with another handed
> >>> version string, where the numbers are delimited by '.'.
> >>>
> >>> Aren't there any version checks done in the pkg-config generator files?
> >>
> >> No, but I guess that's not the place to do it since they are unrelated
> >> to DOLFIN and just produce a foo.pc file.
> >>
> >> I guest the right way is to use 'pkg-config --version foo.pc' rather
> >> than checkVersion.
> >
> > Again, checkVersion is just a function that check if a version string is
> > larger or equal than a passed version string. So the test might look
> > something like this:
> >
> >   foo_version = getoutput("pkg-config --version foo.pc")
> >   if scons.checkVersion(foo_version,"3.0.0"):
> >       raise Error
> 
> Yes, I know how it works ;).

Ok :)

> >> Still, I don't know where this check is best performed.
> >
> > Not sure either. I added an extensive check for the SWIG version in
> > SConscript. I have never felt good about that piece of code...
> >
> > With the present state of the build system it is not easy to answer
> > questions like this. However it would be nice to add some functionality
> > to the scons.cfg file. Instead of passing a list of strings, stating the
> > dependencies we pass a dict.
> >
> > Something like:
> >
> >   OptDependencies = {'petsc':'3.0.0',
> >                      'slepc':'2.3.3':
> >                      'foo':None,
> >                       ...}
> >
> > The checks could then be done in the simula-scons library, when the
> > dependencies are checked for.
> 
> pkg-config does has some fancy features with max and min version
> numbers, but it could get complicated.

Ok. But we still need to find a decent place for setting a required version in 
the build system.

Johan