Openfoam

[Richard Shaw]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 10:20 AM, David Gaden <davegaden at hotmail.com> wrote:
> (First post, am I doing it right?)

Well I can read it so I guess so! :)


> I saw you guys were looking at OpenFOAM, and Richard attempted a build but
> gave up.  I suspect this was bad timing - the guys at OpenCFD just patched
> their repository to accommodate the DSO linking changes (i.e. yesterday).
> Also, as an (independent) OpenFOAM developer, can I be of assistance?

I see that from the average user point of view (POV) that the current
install method keeps things easy, but from a system-wide install POV,
it's horrendous.

To bullet point the issues and obstacles to building for eventual
inclusion to Fedora...

First just plain building/installing issues (never mind the Fedora guidelines).

1. The build from source documentation is pretty bad. The "System
Requirements" need to be broken up between build requirements and
runtime requirements. I.e, do I need <blah> or <blah>-devel... It has
some specific build instructions for different distros and I think I
figured most of them out, but what I need is a list of ALL of the
requirements regardless if their available in a specific distro or
not, I can figure that part out on my own. A table would be really
useful. Something like:

Upstream Project name | Required for (build/runtime/optional?) | Name
in Debian/Ubuntu | Name in SUSE, | etc...

2. The documentation seems to have instructions that are not strictly
needed for installation, but I could just be confused.

3. Wanting to be compiled in the location it's installed to is bad,
bad, bad. It makes building for a system wide install hard. I think I
almost got that working but setting 'foaminstall' to one location for
the build, and then changing it for the install location, but it's
messy.

4. Along those lines, is the entire source tree really needed during use?

Now more Fedora specific issues:

5. The ThridParty package is completely unacceptable. Anything in
there that isn't currently already in Fedora will need to be packaged
first.

6. I'm not sure if the built-in wmake tool is acceptable, it seems to
come from openwatcom.org, it will also need to be packages separately.

7. The 'copy the entire source-tree with the compiled binaries and
libraries' issue from #3. I'm not sure it will be acceptable.

Now once all those are taken care of, all the 3rd party stuff will
have to be ripped out during build to make sure it's not used and the
makefiles patched to use the system libraries where necessary.

All-in-all, a lot of work. Do any of the recent changes solve any of
these issues?

Thanks,
Richard