[firedrake] The wonderful world of firedrake-install

[Justin Chang]

David,

A few comments:

1) If I run that script (w/ --developer) and have the latest installed
petsc-dev and established $PETSC_DIR, the installation of petsc4py
will produce an error similar to the one reported in this thread:
http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-users/2015-July/026404.html
to which I had to either: a) use the patch Satish provided or b) clone
from https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc4py and not mapdes/petsc4py. If
I unset $PETSC_DIR then the installation works fine. Not a major
problem or anything but it seems to me that the installation script is
using a somewhat outdated petsc4py so I was wondering if this was
intentional or not.

2) Some of my problems require some PETSc external packages like
hypre, but I see that the default configure options only include
chaco, ctegen, and triangle. I had to manually add the
--download-hypre to the firedrake-install to get what I wanted, but do
you think y'all can also include other important packages like mumps,
superlu_dist, hdf5, metis, parmetis, etc?

3) Thank you for this, this makes life much easier!

Thanks,
Justin

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 5:05 AM, David Ham <David.Ham at imperial.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear Firedrakers,
>
> I am happy to be able to announce the release of our new install and upgrade
> system for Firedrake. The new system makes installing and upgrading
> Firedrake much easier than the previous instruction set. Particular
> features:
>
> * single command install on MacOS X, Ubuntu (and sometimes other Linux).
> * support for per user or global installations.
> * support for installation into a Python virtualenv to ensure no
> interference between Firedrake and other software (in particular this makes
> installing Firedrake alongside Dolfin safer and easier).
> * Support for "developer mode" installs where core Firedrake components run
> from the source directories.
>
> The core Firedrake developers will be using this install, and it's the
> install system used by our automated build testing, so you can be assured
> that it will always be well tested and emerging bugs will be fixed fast.
>
> Installation instructions are available now from
> http://www.firedrakeproject.org/download.html
>
> I look forward to your feedback on the new system.
>
> Cheers,
>
> David
>
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