#1807: Download instructions do not let a new user compile --------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: rhaas | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: major | Milestone: Component: EinsteinToolkit website | Version: development version Resolution: | Keywords: --------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Comment (by rhaas):
We currently provide a tarball of the ET for the release version. This should be by usable by all users (certainly OSX, Cygwin and Linux). The tarball does not (by choice) contain the version control metadata so it does not let users contribute back changes or even know which revision they are using, there is only the tarball name.
I could (at one point, has been a while) actually compile with the minimal set that Frank has outlined in comment:4, even MPI builds itself and provides mpirun and the like in exe/sim/mpirun. It is very slow to build this way though. On "normal" Linux/OSX systems I would still suggest that users first try installing binary packages through their packaging system. For this to work well on Linux (Debian and Ubuntu more specifically) we need to update the ExternalLibraries scripts' detect.sh to take multi-arch installations into account (Bruno has started on this already).
For one day tutorials the Virtual machines actually seem to be the best solution to me since they ensure that we know exactly what is present on the system, down to an editor. VirtualBox itself is easy to install and eg for the CGWAS school at Caltech we had not problems this year with students not being able to use it. The virtual machine has the advantage that we can provide a pre-build Cactus tree, drastically cutting down on compilation time compared to a full compile from scratch. The downside is the large size of a machine image (about 2GB) though for a local workshop one can provide USB sticks with the machine image.