Subject: [FEniCS-dev] New subproject release -- Dorsal 0.2

From: Harish Narayanan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:31:21 +0200

I'd like to announce a release of Dorsal, a bash script for building
many FEniCS projects (featuring DOLFIN) and their dependencies for
various platforms. A primary goal of the project is to lower the barrier
of entry for people curious to try out DOLFIN.

At the moment, it works reasonably cleanly for the following environments:

* Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
* Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
* Mac OS X 10.5 (with fink)

I envision more platforms being supported in the future as each of these
are relatively straightforward to set up; one just needs access to them
to iron out any system-specific kinks. Let me know if you're interested
in tweaking it for other platforms.

Some URIs:

A (sparse) Wiki page: http://fenics.org/wiki/Dorsal
Its hg repository: http://www.fenics.org/dev/dorsal/
Occasional snapshots: http://home.simula.no/~harish/files/projects/dorsal/

Harish

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From: "Garth N. Wells" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 19:36:50 +0100

Sounds very nice. I know from speaking to quite a number of people that 
new users often struggle when trying to build DOLFIN, and they are often 
unsure of which dependencies are required and which are optional.

A challenging target would be to support Windows.

Will the buildbots run the scripts?

Garth

Harish Narayanan wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> DOLFIN-dev mailing list
> [email-masked]
> http://www.fenics.org/mailman/listinfo/dolfin-dev

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From: Harish Narayanan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:46:33 +0200

> unsure of which dependencies are required and which are optional.

I've started thinking about automatic dependency resolution for future
versions. e.g. If someone wants DOLFIN but not SyFi, it will
automatically skip it, GiNaC and CLN.

> A challenging target would be to support Windows.

Windows support is also on the TODO list. (It's easy to put things on
lists!)  With access to a Windows machine (with Cygwin/MinGW) and some
time, it should be possible.

> Will the buildbots run the scripts?

In my mind that's a near-term goal.

Harish

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From: LUK ShunTim <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:13:32 +0800

> in tweaking it for other platforms.

Hi Harish,

I just tested it out on debian/sib/amd64 using hardy.platform and it
worked quite well. Everything built OTOB until the python-dolfin swig
wrapper. The error is

"cc1plus: warnings being treated as errors
dolfin/swig/dolfin_wrap.cc: In function ‘PyObject*
_wrap_summary(PyObject*, PyObject*)’:
dolfin/swig/dolfin_wrap.cc:30015: error: ‘argv[0]’ may be used
uninitialized in this function
..."

Not due to dorsal, though. Thanks for the work.

Regards,
ST
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From: Harish Narayanan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:03:12 +0200

> uninitialized in this function

Cool. That is a documented problem (and I know how to get around it.)

Do you mean Debian Sid? I'm asking because I can then add it as a
working platform.

Harish

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From: Harish Narayanan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:05:08 +0200

[email-masked] wrote:
> Cygwin is a nightmare.  I started that way.  It ended up being easier to
> just switch to LINUX.

OK, then perhaps I (someone) will spend some time trying things out with
MinGW.

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From: LUK ShunTim <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:03:21 +0800

> Cool. That is a documented problem (and I know how to get around it.)

Ya, I recalled it seemd to be due to some "-Werror" option but I don't
know enough about scons. If it's easy to fix, can you send a diff to the
list. I'd also like to test it on my debian/sid/i386 laptop with the
debian packaged cln, ginac and slepc (No slepc in amd64 yet, though).

> Do you mean Debian Sid? I'm asking because I can then add it as a

Yes. My typo, sorry.

Regards,
ST
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From: "Johan Hoffman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:50:56 +0200 (MEST)

Sounds great Harish, this is very useful!

/Johan