[Users] meeting minutes for 2016-02-15

[Roland Haas]

Hello Ian, all,

> 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.
Yes, there are certainly points where the automatics just fail (a
current example is hwloc+numa using static linking on Ubuntu systems).
We currently provide option for all of the listed systems and they are
somewhat regularly tested (once before each ET release):

https://docs.einsteintoolkit.org/et-docs/Simplified_Tutorial_for_New_Users#Configuring

The idea behind using pkg-config is that this should continue to work
even when there are small changes in the location of libraries etc. It
is the difference between using autoconf's configure scripts and
hard-coding a set of known paths for supported environments. Basically I
think about it like the first answer given here
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.64/html_node/Why-Not-Imake.html

The option lists are also part of simfactory and usually we would like
to avoid very explicit usage of simfactory in core-Cactus functionality.

Yours,
Roland