On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Anders Logg <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > One thing I think is missing on our web page is a collection of good > installation recipes and, possibly, other FEniCS-related recipes. > > We do have good binary packages, but instructions for building from > source could be better. Here are some issues I think we need to solve: > > 1. How do we want to continue to support Dorsal? Is anyone actively > maintaining it? Should it be the officially supported way to install > FEniCS from source on all platforms, including Mac?
No, Dorsal is not actively maintained. Many package files and platform files are not particular up to date. I have been working for a while on HashDist [1] and I have successfully used it to install FEniCS on Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL6/7, Mac, Windows (Cygwin) and on two different clusters (Abel and SciNet). HashDist is better than Dorsal in many ways: it has caching of builds, it handles dependencies between packages, it is reproducible, it is customizable, it will get support for binary builds, and it is actively maintained/developed. Currently, HashDist does not detect your platform like Dorsal does, or create a conf file that can be sourced to set environment variables, so it might not be as easy as Dorsal for FEniCS newcomers. However, this will likely improve in the future. It would be great if someone else than me could try to build FEniCS using HashDist. Please don't hesitate to send comments, suggestions or report issues. For those interested, there is also an introduction to HashDist at [2]. [1] https://hashdist.github.io/ [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wviHkzk0AkY Johannes > 2. The installation instructions on the web page are very static and > difficult to keep up-to-date, since it requires making a pull request > for the website Sphinx code, getting someone to apply the pull request > etc. > > 3. Is there a good alternative in the form of a collection of "FEniCS > recipes", to which anyone can contribute (perhaps wiki style), ideally > also in combination with some voting mechanism (thumbs up = works for > me) so that we may organically keep track of, say, the best way of > the day to build FEniCS on OS X. > > Ideally, we would host this on fenicsproject.org, but perhaps there > are already existing web services that could be used? > > 4. Could those installation recipes be made scriptable? And then how > would this be different from Dorsal? I like Dorsal, but it seems not > everyone is on board with using Dorsal as the main/official way of > FEniCS installation. > > -- > Anders > _______________________________________________ > fenics mailing list > [email protected] > http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics _______________________________________________ fenics mailing list [email protected] http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics
