[ET Trac] [Einstein Toolkit] #136: Don't rebuild external libraries so often

[Einstein Toolkit]

#136: Don't rebuild external libraries so often
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  Reporter:  eschnett     |       Owner:     
      Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new
  Priority:  minor        |   Milestone:     
 Component:  Cactus       |     Version:     
Resolution:               |    Keywords:     
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Comment (by eschnett):

 When Cactus builds external libraries, it makes extensive use of the
 options that the user specified. In many cases, building is not possible
 without such options, e.g. when it comes to choosing a CPU architecture,
 switching between 32-bit and 64-bit mode, or finding good C and Fortran
 compilers. Another problem is finding other libraries on which a certain
 library depends (e.g. PETSc depends on LAPACK). On some systems, the
 standard make/ar/ranlib/tar tools do not quite work out of the box.

 In general, when one uses only C, and when a library does not depend on
 other libraries, then it can be built without problems. Often, this is
 also the case for C++, but certainly not for Fortran.

 Cactus "knows" how to build and install these libraries because it knows
 how to configure them.

 What would be possible is to take a certain option list and to build a set
 of external libraries with these. These can then be installed somewhere,
 but it does not matter whether this is inside a Cactus source tree, or
 outside, or whether we call this a "mini-configuration", or whether we
 look for such mini-configurations in other Cactus source trees, or in the
 home directory of another user.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.einsteintoolkit.org/ticket/136#comment:8>
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