On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 11:20:20AM -0800, Roland Haas wrote:
- suggestion to not include that tarball in ExternalLibraries, instead
download in configure.sh script of thorn only if needed. Not yet fully agreed on whether we want this or not.
This can sometimes be difficult to make work. In some cases one has to build on a compute node (e.g. when some libraries are only installed there, e.g. GPU-related libraries - this is currently the case for instance on supermike). However, compute nodes might not be able to make connections directly to the Internet, or there might be policies against it.
I would rather like a solution that downloads the tarball together with the thorn.
This is primarily a problem for large libraries though, especially when a corresponding system library exists and is used. It doesn't only increase the size of a checkout, it also increases the size of the executable (when using Formaline). We could exclude external libraries from Formaline (at least the dist subdirectory) - system libraries are not included as well after all. This would leave us with the problem of the large checkout. I don't think the download is so much of a problem, but the disk space might be. As long as it is a tarball it should at least not be a huge inode problem, and can easily be compressed.
Frank