#136: Don't rebuild external libraries so often --------------------------+------------------------------------------------- Reporter: eschnett | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: minor | Milestone: Component: Cactus | Version: Resolution: | Keywords: --------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
Comment (by eschnett):
When Cactus builds external libraries, it makes extensive use of the options that the user specified. In many cases, building is not possible without such options, e.g. when it comes to choosing a CPU architecture, switching between 32-bit and 64-bit mode, or finding good C and Fortran compilers. Another problem is finding other libraries on which a certain library depends (e.g. PETSc depends on LAPACK). On some systems, the standard make/ar/ranlib/tar tools do not quite work out of the box.
In general, when one uses only C, and when a library does not depend on other libraries, then it can be built without problems. Often, this is also the case for C++, but certainly not for Fortran.
Cactus "knows" how to build and install these libraries because it knows how to configure them.
What would be possible is to take a certain option list and to build a set of external libraries with these. These can then be installed somewhere, but it does not matter whether this is inside a Cactus source tree, or outside, or whether we call this a "mini-configuration", or whether we look for such mini-configurations in other Cactus source trees, or in the home directory of another user.