fenics team mailing list archive

[Martin Sandve Alnæs <martinal@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 March 2013 22:31, Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 10:14:11PM +0100, Martin Sandve Alnæs wrote:
>


> >   b) The list contains files like Changelog, CMakeLists.txt from the
> >   build system which obviously need to be retained, as well as meshes
> >   used by demos.
>
> Did you look at the wrong file?


Yes...

And I don't see why we need to keep the meshes. They will be
> downloaded and bundled as part of tarballs and distributions. And can
> be easily downloaded by users who clone the repository via a simple
> script.


The consequence is that when downloading an earlier dolfin version the
meshes may not be available or may have changed, unless we version
the downloadable meshes as well.

>   c) In any event we should keep checked in the few generated files that
> >   are part of the dolfin source, so _building_ dolfin does not have
> >   dependencies to the entire fenics toolchain.
>
> I see the point but have heard different opinions on this issue. More
> opinions? We have a few files currently in dolfin/ale and many more
> generated files in the past being part of the library.


Not only does it make dolfin depend on the entire fenics toolchain being
installed, but that compatible versions of ufl/ffc are installed.
This makes it harder to check out and build different versions of dolfin
in a bughunt where reverting ufl/ffc would not be necessary.

>   d) How does the build system know when to/which files to regenerate? I
> >   guess calling ffc as part of the building of C++ demos is no worse than
> >   the jitting in Python demos. This will add quite a bit to the demo/test
> >   build time though.
> >   Martin
>
> My suggestion to Johannes was to make it part of calling cmake. Then
> it gets built only once, and developers will know where to look for a
> script to rebuild them when necessary (inside cmake/scripts).
>

Ok, I actually wondered once why that wasn't the case to begin with :)
It can't easily know when e.g. ffc has changed though, so keeping the
forced rebuild script will be useful.

Martin