fenics team mailing list archive

[Johan Hake <hake@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 11 February 2009 22:18:56 Balbir Thomas wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Johan Hake <hake@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Can you please hand the error message that says that you need swig
> > >=1.3.37?
>
> Well the debian/control file (of dolfin) lists it as a hard dependency in
> the Build-Depends line "swig (>=1.3.37)" . 

Ok. I think the logic was that as we provide packages for swig 1.3.37 we just 
made it depend on 1.3.37. Could this hard dependency be loosened up Johannes?

> I am glad to know that the swig 
> dependency is >= 1.3.35. This would mean that the segmentation fault
> problems is not because of swig but because of MPI. I do have both MPICH
> and OPENMPI installed. They were installed automatically when I choose some
> of the debian science and math "tasks" (packages), meaning expect others to
> face the same situation. From what you (Johan) say I suspect that MPICH is
> the culprit. Though I have not decided how i am going to confirm this short
> of uninstalling mpich and all the packages that depend on it, potentially
> breaking my fresh Debian/Lenny install. Any suggestions ? I plan to play
> around with different configure options and see how i can isolate the
> dolfin build process and subsequent use from seeing mpich. This may just be
> a bug in the packaging but could also be a problem with the pkg-config
> setup (--cflags etc).
>
> Another potential problem with the Build-Depends line is the fact that it
> has "python-all". However on all current deb based distributions
> "python-all" includes python2.4 (even on lenny). But Fenics is not
> compatible with python2.4 as far as I know since it uses additions to
> python since python2.5 such as set functions "any", "all" and lexical
> elements such as generators etc. I believe python-all must be replaced by
> python (>=2.5) on the build depends line.

I just forward this to our debian packages maintainer, Johannes?

> > > I am not sure how the compatablility is for lenny, but you should be
> > > able
> >
> > to
> >
> > > build most fenics packages using dorsal,
>
> I could use dorsal but shouldn't the debian source package be enough and be
> the recomended way to build fenics on a deb based distribution ? After all
> if Fenics is going to make it into one of the official Debian (or Debian
> based) distributions it will need to build cleanly from the source package.
> I maintain a local repository of deb packages on my computer to make it
> easy for me to do automated upgrades and rebuilds using Debian's built-in
> tools, for packages that are not part of the Debian distributions as yet.

You are of course right!

>  > <http://www.fenics.org/wiki/Dorsal>
>  > It should support Etch and "testing"
> >
> > The problem with Etch and the source packages were the build
> > dependencies.
>
> For instance libsuitesparse among many others. Despite this I spent a
> couple of days installing all the build dependencies on Etch and trying to
> port Fenics to python2.4 but finally decided I may find it easier to work
> with Debian/Lenny. While in principle it is possible to rewrite the build
> dependencies so that builds are successfull on Etch too, I think it would
> not be worth the effort given lenny seems to be right around the corner and
> the fact that in Etch the recomended python version is 2.4 (but is 2.5 in
> lenny). However there are problems with lenny too (in particular the
> segfaults). Once again while I appreciate the Fenics developers efforts in
> writing dorsal (and I will probably check it out), I would like to still
> request them to provide source packages that may cleanly be built by
> themselves. Perhaps dorsal can be a wrapper over the Debian/Ubuntu and
> RedHat source packages. Is it so ? I havent' checked it out but will do so.
> I hope you do see why I urge this case.
>
> > When something happens in a C++ demo swig cannot be blamed.
>
> Agreed. I thought so too and so I mentioned the fact.
>
> > It looks like something happens in some MPI code. DOLFIN is confirmed to
>
> work\
>
> > with the OpenMPI that comes with the Ubuntu hardy/intrepid versions.
>
> Agreed. And I believe this is the likely problem too. I will try and dig
> deeper (as mentioned above) on this issue but am not sure how far I will
> get. It will be great if one of your developers could also try to replicate
> these issues on Debian/Lenny, as my familiarity with the Fenics source code
> is limited. Kindly do post a patch to this thread if one of the Fenics
> developers does find the problem. I will do so to should I ... .

Probably Johannes can come back with more fruitfull comments about the debian 
packages issues you have!

Johan