[ET Trac] [Einstein Toolkit] #1807: Download instructions do not let a new user compile

[Einstein Toolkit]

#1807: Download instructions do not let a new user compile
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  Reporter:  rhaas                    |       Owner:                     
      Type:  enhancement              |      Status:  new                
  Priority:  major                    |   Milestone:                     
 Component:  EinsteinToolkit website  |     Version:  development version
Resolution:                           |    Keywords:                     
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Comment (by rhaas):

 We currently provide a tarball of the ET for the release version. This
 should be by usable by all users (certainly OSX, Cygwin and Linux). The
 tarball does not (by choice) contain the version control metadata so it
 does not let users contribute back changes or even know which revision
 they are using, there is only the tarball name.

 I could (at one point, has been a while) actually compile with the minimal
 set that Frank has outlined in comment:4, even MPI builds itself and
 provides mpirun and the like in exe/sim/mpirun. It is very slow to build
 this way though. On "normal" Linux/OSX systems I would still suggest that
 users first try installing binary packages through their packaging system.
 For this to work well on Linux (Debian and Ubuntu more specifically) we
 need to update the ExternalLibraries scripts' detect.sh to take multi-arch
 installations into account (Bruno has started on this already).

 For one day tutorials the Virtual machines actually seem to be the best
 solution to me since they ensure that we know exactly what is present on
 the system, down to an editor. VirtualBox itself is easy to install and eg
 for the CGWAS school at Caltech we had not problems this year with
 students not being able to use it. The virtual machine has the advantage
 that we can provide a pre-build Cactus tree, drastically cutting down on
 compilation time compared to a full compile from scratch. The downside is
 the large size of a machine image (about 2GB) though for a local workshop
 one can provide USB sticks with the machine image.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.einsteintoolkit.org/ticket/1807#comment:5>
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The Einstein Toolkit