#1158: ExternalLibraries/HDF5 should change the defaults for HDF5_ENABLE_CXX and HDF5_ENABLE_FORTRAN to "no". ------------------------------------+--------------------------------------- Reporter: knarf | Owner: Type: defect | Status: confirmed Priority: minor | Milestone: Component: EinsteinToolkit thorn | Version: development version Resolution: | Keywords: ------------------------------------+---------------------------------------
Comment (by eschnett):
Ian: True. Still, I don't like the idea that adding or removing a thorn would potentially re-build the HDF5 library and all thorns that depend on it.
We can't make things more and more complex to cater to all possible wishes that people have. At some point, there's just a cost that has to be paid. In Frank's example, the cost is 140 seconds for a full build, which is a rare occasion.
For example, MacPorts provides HDF5 with Fortran bindings if the +Fortran variant is chosen; Ubuntu provides Fortran bindings by default, etc. I also assume that most people only install HDF5 on their laptops/workstations because the ET install instructions say so. Couldn't we just ask for the Fortran bindings as well? Which systems don't provide a system HDF5 with Fortran?
Fortran is an important language for the ET, and HDF5 is the file format we want to advertise over ASCII or pure binary files. Thus we should make it easy to read/write HDF5 from Fortran.