dorsal team mailing list archive

[Andy Ray Terrel <andy.terrel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Harish Narayanan
<harish.mlists@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 10/8/10 1:07 PM, Garth N. Wells wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 08/10/10 11:58, Anders Logg wrote:
>>> On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 10:10:02AM +0100, Garth N. Wells wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 08/10/10 08:18, Anders Logg wrote:
>>>>> 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.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Another thing that we've discussed is using MacPorts rather than the
>>>> Apple supplied compilers and libs. If we use MacPorts for everything
>>>> and have the configuration system check for MacPorts versions, we
>>>> can be more confident in what's being used. Hopefully the PETSc
>>>> Fortran issue would then go away too.
>>>>
>>>> Garth
>>>
>>> Yes, that's an option but it would require quite a bit of work and
>>> Harish didn't think it was worth the effort.
>>>
>>
>> It didn't seem to me that the work was the issue. My recollection is
>> that Harish favoured using the systems libs over MacPorts.
>
> Yes, this was my issue. But I also independently tried for a few hours
> to use the MacPorts versions and things stalled somewhere. If anyone is
> willing to make necessary changes to the .platform file and check it
> thoroughly, please do so and submit a patch.
>
> I have received 2--3 sets of e-mails reporting problems with Mac OS X
> these past days. The trouble here is that I have not been able to
> reproduce any of the problems (including those in Andy's e-mail). And I
> think I have a pretty standard set up.

Well this just goes to show how fragile Mac OS X package systems are.
I would say that my system is pretty standard too.  If I get a
platform file that works with just MacPorts I'll send it along.  For
now I would think putting in some verbage about using Apple's gcc and
openmp would be good.  The fortran issue seems to have gone away,
probably caused by me playing around with the wrong lapack files.

-- Andy


>
> Harish
>
> Harish
>
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