[Users] meeting minutes for 2016-02-15

[Ian Hinder]

On 15 Feb 2016, at 21:06, Roland Haas <rhaas at aei.mpg.de> wrote:

> 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".

Given that we would have to test such an automatic mechanism on the systems that we want to support (RedHat, Ubuntu, etc), it would also be possible to just provide an optionlist for each one.  I agree that automatic is better, but if the logic becomes too complicated when trying to work around the idiosyncrasies of a particular platform, then it would be much easier to simplify the logic and set the required options manually in the optionlist.

--
Ian Hinder
http://members.aei.mpg.de/ianhin

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