[Users] Problem installing Einstein Toolkit on Mac

[Roland Haas]

Hello Rob,

> Thanks for all of your help on this.  I'm still failing dismally.  I have
> made some notes against yours below and attached relevant files.

Thank you.


> > I have seen issues with Macs that change their machine name since they
> > get derive it from their WiFi IP address. So here's my suggestion:
> >
> > * run hostname -f to find out your laptops (current) machine name
> >  
> Robs-Mac-mini.local
> 
> >
> > * compare to the output of `simfactory/bin/sim whoami` which should be
> >   similar
> >  
> Current machine: Robs-Mac-mini.local

Ok, that all looks ok to me.

> > INI file attached below:::::  The name is exactly the same  

That would also be ok.

> The optionlist mentioned is : optionlist      = generic.cfg
> I have also attached this optionlist.  It refers to F90 = gfortran .

Very strange. The only way that, on a mac, I could think of ending up
with a setup like this would be if one had run

simfactory/bin/sim setup-silent

before having installed gfortran and gcc from homebrew or machports. Or
really having run the command when say gcc-13 was not in $PATH.

Note that running 

simfactory/bin/sim setup-silent

*then* installing macport and running 

simfactory/bin/sim setup-silent

will do you no good. You have to first remove the ini file
robs-mac-mini.local.ini (or the whole Cactus tree of course), otherwise
simfactory treats your mac mini as a "known machine" and does not
generate a ini file for it (and instead uses the existing one).

Though, with Homebrew, there actually is a gfortran file installed by
Homebrew that is (at least for me) in $PATH and should be usable.


> appropriate both from within a Terminal and from withint the jupyter
> > notebook (in a %%bash cell or using !). (*/opt/homebrew/bin/gfortran-13*
> > and *gfortran-mp-13 not found* respectively)

Ok, so something is messed up with the Homebrew and MacPorts install
since they did not add their "bin" directories to $PATH. Not sure why.

You can manually edit generic.cfg and instead of just having

F90 = gfortran

add the full path, so something like

F90 = /opt/homebrew/bin/gfortran

and similar for the other compilers (so that it does *not* use Apple's
clang-in-gcc-disguise in /usr/bin).

This may help. Note that generic.cfg is part of the git checkout, so a
git pull in simfactory2 will net you conflicts.

> II originally used MacPorts but when this failed I did the Homebrew stuff
> as well.  Is this okay or will this now have led to some conflicts?

Could be ok, though mixing those two can cause trouble in case some
libraries and tools are used from one and some from the other. Then
adding eg conda to the mix would tend to make things even worse.

> I have also now tried installing VMWare and creating an Ubuntu virtual
> machine but I could not get Jupyter Notebook to install on my 65bitArm
> version and my shell experience is really patchy.  I feel like I've just
> turned up at medical school and have been given a heart transplant to
> perform!!!

Yes, that would seem too much effort. Really it should work. My guess
would be that you may have (wisely) avoided adding any of Homebrew's or
MacPort's bin directories to your $PATH and this is the source of the
problem. You could try this by removing the ini file, adding eg
Homebrew's bin to PATH in a Terminal and running simfactory/bin/sim
setup-silent and sim build in that terminal. If that works, then you
have a way to make things work and have to decide on a way to switch
between Homebrew and non-homebrew setups depending on what you would
like to do.

> I think my biggest problem here is my understanding of the underling
> stuff.  I've programmed for years but in C#, Java, Python etc so rarely get
> my hands dirty in the back-end.  I suspect I need to remove/uninstall some
> more stuff and start again but wouldn't know where to start with this.
> I've only been running this new Mac-mini for a few months so if I felt I
> had a good chance of success I would be tempted to do a full clean
> re-install of Ventura since all of my data is cloud backed.

Simfactory is a wrapper around (among other things) the Cactus build
system. With the cfg files being option list files as described in the
Cactus user guide:

http://einsteintoolkit.org/usersguide/UsersGuide.html#x1-18000B2

which are (almost) makefile fragments (though they are first parsed by
Cactus so you cannot use arbitrary make constructs in them, eg
variable expansion using $(FOO) does not work).

Yours,
Roland

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