dolfin team mailing list archive

[Myles English <mylesenglish@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Johannes,

>> On Mon, 7 May 2012 14:55:06 +0200, Johannes Ring said:

  > Yes, we should add that.  Myles: Since I'm not familiar with the
  > package manager in Arch Linux, could you please write down the basic
  > commands one would use to install FEniCS using your packages?

I should have mentioned that these are not 'official' binary packages
and are in the Arch User Repository (AUR).  A 'package' in this
repository is really just a shell script that downloads and build the
package locally.  There are various tools for interacting with the AUR
so I can't give specific instructions but the procedure is described
here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository#Installing_packages

The basic instructions for installing FEniCS on Arch Linux are to:

1. install from the official repos:

   $ sudo pacman -S bzr cmake swig boost libxml2 lapack blas python2-numpy /
      python2-scientificpython

2. build and install all these packages from the AUR in the following
   order: parmetis, metis, petsc, slepc, trilinos, instan-bzr, fiat-bzr,
   ufl-bzr, ufc-bzr, ffc-bzr, viper-bzr, dolfin-bzr, along with any
   other dependencies they may need

  > BTW: I have seen reports that the dolfin package does not work and
  > that it is recommended to install the dolfin-bzr package. However,
  > there does not seem to be any -bzr packages for the other FEniCS
  > components? Using DOLFIN from trunk together with the stable
  > packages will likely lead to trouble so it would be best to get the
  > dolfin 1.0.0 package working. Or, alternatively, provide -bzr
  > packages for all of the other FEniCS components and make dolfin-bzr
  > depend on those.

I came to the same conclusion.  It makes more sense for those running
Arch Linux to use the latest bzr tip so I am going to orphan the
packages that correspond with dolfin 1.0.0 (and delete them in a couple
of weeks) and focus on the *-bzr packages I have just added.

Just a technical note on dependencies: for flexibility, ffc-bzr depends
on (e.g.)  'ufc' rather than 'ufc-bzr'.  This is because ufc-bzr
provides(ufc), as does the package ufc and the package ufc-dev.  All the
*-bzr packages are in their own group called fenics-bzr.  My local
development packages can then be in a group called fenics-dev and the
dolfin 1.0.0 compatible package can be in the group fenics.  This is
useful because once in the hands of the Arch Linux package manager --
pacman -- I can replace the installed package ufc-bzr with ufc-dev, for
testing, and the dependencies are still satisfied.  I haven't yet found
a tool for interacting with the AUR that uses the group variable or
handles the dependencies as I would like though.

  > Johannes

For ease of managing all these packages I add them to a local pacman
repo then the group variable becomes useful and I can look for all those
in fenics-bzr like this: pacman -Ss fenics-bzr

When this has bedded in for a while I could making binaries available
somewhere and also release a script to do most of the downloading and
building automatically.

-- 
  `--[ Myles ]