dorsal team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 04:29:05PM -0500, Andy Ray Terrel wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I wanted to send in my unsuccessful account of installing FEniCS with
> Dorsal, hopefully there can be someone who benefits from this.
>
> My installation was attempted by updating mac ports and installing the
> list of ports requested by dorsal.
>
> The first problem I encountered was vtk-devel +python26 doesn't work
> for mac ports unless you are using the gcc originally installed by
> Apple (/usr/bin/g++-4.2).
>
> Second, petsc complained that fortran for mpi can't be used.  At this
> point I tried out the openmpi ports project but that caused many
> headaches later.  Perhaps setting --with-fortran=0 would be good here.
>
> Next, petsc could not link to metis correctly, turns out the octave
> port installed a older version of metis that was getting in the way.
>
> Finally, everything installs but when I run any demo, the demo runs
> then openmpi gives an error claiming 1) a system-required executable
> either could not be found and 2) mpi_init is called after finalize.  I
> couldn't figure out what is going on here as the mpi init and finalize
> should be set correctly by the subsystem manager.  The problem did not
> occur when running the Petsc demos.
>
> At this point I just installed everything by hand. Since Anders says
> things work, I wanted to make sure there was some knowledge of where
> things are breaking in the wild.  If you want me to try something
> different for testing let me know.

Thanks for the report. It seems like most of the issues result from
using a different configuration than what Harish and I have been using
when testing (not using GCC from Apple etc). I'm not sure how to fix
this. It would require quite a bit more of work on the build scripts.

One thing that might solve this issue is a mac bundle (.dmg) for the
whole FEniCS (which does not even require mac ports). It might not be
the best option for you if you want to control which GCC etc is used,
but it might help others.

The Fortran thing seems strange. The PETSc package for Snow Leopard
(petsccore.package) avoids things like --download-hypre=yes since the
OpenMPI from mac ports didn't come compiled with Fortran.

--
Anders