[Users] meeting minutes for 2016-02-15

[Roland Haas]

Hello all,

> Regarding the last point, I think we should keep in mind that the
> thorns in ExternalLibraries currently fulfil two functions.  The
> first is to provide a wrapper to an installed version of the library,
> and the second is to build and install the library itself.  The
> "spack" project, as well as the library features in simfactory 3,
> address the second function.  We would still need a common interface
> in ExternalLibraries for the first function, which should work
> whether the library is installed via Cactus or exists on the system
> independently.  For now, I would focus on this feature, rather than
> the build/install feature.
ok. Build-install is actually usually the easier thing to do, and hence
is our fallback.

> One thing that occurs to me is that the current system might be "too
> clever", trying to automatically handle many use cases.  When looking
> at updating it, we might consider whether the code can be simplified
> by allowing just "automatic" or "manual" for each feature, where
> "automatic" works in very standard cases, but does not try too hard
> to work in every case.  I'm thinking of searching for libraries and
> headers etc. here.
My position is usually: that the automated detection must work on common
laptops and workstations since we will use first time users if they
download to their workstation and it fails to even compile. My current
list of "important" systems is current OSX, Ubuntu Linux (long term
stable and current), RedHat Linux and I would expect pkg-config to be
present on Linux workstations (but maybe not on OSX?). Beyond that there
should be a fully manual mode suitable for clusters. Anything in between
I personally would consider "optional".

Yours,
Roland


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