1 A new design for the ThirdParty packages compilation and installation process:
2 ==============================================================================
4 The main purpose of this new development is to build a complete ThirParty
5 packages set for foam-extend-3.1 using only the original package source
6 tarball and some patch files (when necessary).
8 A useful by-product of this development is also to provide some kind of
9 binary packaging of the ThirdParty packages. There are currently two types of
10 binary packaging generated by this compilation process: RPMs and compressed
13 The RPM package manager was selected to develop a first prototype. RPM is
14 available for multiple flavors of Unix/Linux, and offers all the necessary
15 functionnality to configured, patch, compile and install source code packages.
17 One of the main requirement for this new development is that the whole process
18 needs to run and install in user-space, without the need to be root for
19 installing the packages.
21 Here is what's available:
23 a: A set of RPM spec files for specific ThirdParty packages.
24 b: A set of bash scripts to automate the complete sequence of downloading,
25 compiling, installing and generating RPMs.
26 c: An directory structure pre-configured and ready to proceed with the
27 download, compilation and installation of chosen ThirdParty packages for
31 1: Quick description of the main scripts:
32 -----------------------------------------
34 Main wrapper script that will call AllMake.stage0 to AllMake.stage4
38 This script is useful only for populating what I am calling the local "RPM
39 vault" with pre-generated RPMs.
41 This is the script written to address the following use case:
42 "I have some pre-generated RPM files, now what"
44 Basically, you call this script with a list of RPMs already generated by
45 whichever of the AllMake.stage(1-4) in order to populate the local RPMS
46 vault. Once in place in the RPM vault, these are the RPMs that will get
47 directly installed by the AllMake.stage(1-4) scripts, instead of being
48 regenerated by the normal compilation and install process of the
52 This script is taking care of the basic ThirdParty tools like compilers,
53 flex, bison, cmake , python, etc.
54 This compilation stage will generate .sh and .csh files that will be
55 sourced by your file settings.sh or settings.csh in order to initialize
56 the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable for the stage1 packages.
59 This script is taking care of the MPI communication libraries. Right now,
60 only OpenMPI is supported.
61 This compilation stage will generate .sh and .csh files that will be
62 sourced by your file settings.sh or settings.csh in order to initialize
63 the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable for the stage2 packages.
66 This script is taking care of the "standard" ThirdParty libraries like
67 metis, scotch, mesquite, etc.
68 This compilation stage will generate .sh and .csh files that will be
69 sourced by your file settings.sh or settings.csh in order to initialize
70 the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable for the stage3 packages.
73 This script is taking care of Paraview and QT (and this step will take an
74 awfull long time to compile, honest...).
75 This compilation stage will generate .sh and .csh files that will be
76 sourced by your file settings.sh or settings.csh in order to initialize
77 the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable for the stage4 packages.
79 g: tools/makeThirdPartyFunctionsForRPM:
80 A set of bash functions useful for wrapping the rpmbuild and rpm commands
85 Every single ThirdParty package will be installed with a set of companion .sh
86 and .csh files one needs to source in order to properly initialize the PATH and
87 LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables for running the packages.
89 Some packages will also create environments variables necessary for the
90 compilation of some foam-extend libraries.
92 The scripts AllMake.stage[1-4] are taking care of refreshing the environment
93 variable after the installation of every single package, so you will not need to
94 manually refresh your foam-extend environment yourself when building individual
95 ThirdParty packages through the AllMake.stage[1-4] scripts.
97 The main Allwmake script for the compilation of foam-extend will also take care of
98 refreshing the environment variable before moving on to the compilation of the
99 main foam-extend libraries and applications.
101 However, if you decide to compile the libraries and/or applications manually, or
102 through the src/Allwmake or applications/Allwmake scripts, YOU MUST MAKE SURE
103 YOUR ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES FOR THE THIRDPARTY PACKAGES ARE UPDATED FIRST!
105 In that case, simply resource your bashrc or cshrc file once, before moving on
106 with the rest of your compilation activities.
109 3: The building and installation process overview:
110 --------------------------------------------------
111 For every ThirdParty packages, this is the basic process we will be going
112 through when starting the compilation from scratch:
114 a: Verify in the local "RPM vault" if a RPM file is available for the
115 required ThirdParty package.
117 b: If the RPM is available, and the package already installed, then there is
118 nothing to do for this package, and we proceed with the next package.
120 c: If the RPM is available, and the package is NOT already installed, then
121 we simply install it using the RPM and move on to the next package.
123 d: if the RPM is absent:
124 1: we verify if the source tarbal is available from the SOURCES "vault"
125 2: if it is not, we download the tarball using the specified URL.
126 3: we then proceed with the extraction, patching, configuration,
127 compilation, RPM generation, TGZ generation and installation of the
131 - The generated RPM is always used for the installation, not the TGZ file.
133 - The compressed tarball (.tgz) file is generated for systems where
134 using rpm for installing packages as a non-root user might be a problem.
136 - The .rpm files will be located under the directory
137 $WM_THIRD_PARTY_DIR/rpmBuild/RPMS
139 - The .tgz files will be located under the directory
140 $WM_THIRD_PARTY_DIR/rpmBuild/TGZS
142 e: The default installation root directory is "$WM_THIRD_PARTY_DIR".
143 This can be overridden though when installing the RPM.
145 f: Through the modification of the AllMake.stage[1-4] scripts, it is
146 possible to specify a modified version of a .spec file for a given
147 package in order to tweak its local compilation or installation.
149 The modified .spec file will have to be installed under the SPECS
150 directory, and the corresponding invocation or the command rpm_make in
151 the AllMake.stage[1-4] file will need to be modified accordingly.
154 4: Relocating the RPM root installation directory:
155 --------------------------------------------------
157 Warning: This section is a bit advanced, and as of yet, I have no evidence that
158 this feature has ever been used by anybody. So please feel free to skip
159 this section if you don't need to relocate your ThirdParty packages
160 installation directory, which you should not have do on most
163 a: All the generated RPMs can be relocated, meaning that you can override
164 the hard-coded root installation directory when using those RPMs for
167 b: You can check that the RPM is relocatable by using the command rpm -qip
168 thePackage.rpm. For example, from the cmake-2.8.3 package generated on one
169 of my machines, I will get:
171 > rpm -qip cmake-2.8.3-darwinIntelGccDPOpt.i386.rpm| grep Relocations
172 Name : cmake Relocations: /home/beaudoin/foam/foam-extend-3.1/ThirdParty
174 The Relocations path is the actual location pointed by the
175 $WM_THIRD_PARTY_DIR on my virtual machine when I generated the RPM. It is
176 the indication that the RPM is relocatable. This path will end up being
177 hardcoded in the RPM because the environment variable was expanded before
180 This is the default root directory where the RPM will install its
181 "payload". This can be overridden using the 'rpm' command-line parameter
182 --relocate OLDPATH=NEWPATH .
184 For example, let's say I want to install my cmake-2.8.3 RPM under the root
185 directory /tmp/someDir instead. I will need to call the 'rpm' command like
188 rpm -ivh ./cmake-2.8.3-darwinIntelGccDPOpt.i386.rpm \
189 --relocate /home/beaudoin/foam/foam-extend-3.1/ThirdParty=/tmp/someDir
191 Even better, you can dig down the hard-coded path even deeper in order to
192 relocate the whole installation directory, down to the last hard-coded
194 Just specify the whole path when using the --relocate parameter
195 So basically, you can install the RPM right under /usr if you want, hence
196 bypassing the default sequence of package subdirectories I have chosen in
197 order to stay close to the "traditional" ThirdParty layout.
202 a: Testing testing testing. This prototype was tested on the following
205 Centos 5.5 64-bit (RPM based)
206 Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) (non RPM based)
207 OpenSUSE 11.3 64-bit (RPM based)
208 RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 64-bit (RPM based)
209 Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit (non RPM based)
210 Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit (non RPM based)
212 b: Maybe adding some RPM dependencies might be useful. I have not explored
215 c: Supplying compilation recipes with the source code for various OSes.
216 Lots of traffic on the Forum about this. This does not need to be that
221 6: Gotchas and solutions:
222 -------------------------
224 1: It was reported that version 5.2.0 of rpm does not work well with the provided scripts.
225 rpm version 5.2.1 is working nicely.
228 2: Error messages from rpm:
230 Problem : error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lock/rpm/transaction
232 Solution: add the following entry in your file ~/.rpmmacros
234 %_rpmlock_path %{_dbpath}/__db.000
240 Please report ThirdParty packages related bugs to the Bug tracking system
242 http://sourceforge.net/apps/mantisbt/openfoam-extend/main_page.php