On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 10:58:31AM -0400, Erik Schnetter wrote:
I think we want to move away from building external libraries as part of the Cactus build; instead, we want to build them ahead of time, e.g. via Simfactory. This has several advantages, such as e.g. that a "make clean" doesn't require rebuilding the libraries, and that several Cactus configurations can use the same external libraries, and that one can even have one power user build the libraries on a system while all others simply use them.
I think this is a good idea.
I know this because I implemented this in Simfactory3, and I definitively think this is the way to go. The current build recipes use Clang (not gcc, and not the system's "standard" compiler) for building. I did this because I was interested in C++11, and most system compilers (Intel, PGI, older versions of GCC, current Nvidia) don't support this. However, in the interest of backward compatibility we should probably also provide build recipes for (say) an older version of GCC that is supported by all compilers.
We probably would need that, and I myself would want that too. gcc is a pseudo-standard we have to support.
Frank