.deb from CAELinux 2009

What .deb are you talking about?

In fact, there are not so many things in deb-packages in there, since almost all additional software is compiled and installed in the system mostly in /opt. After this step the image is produced with Remastersys. This is the "ad-hoc" way it is done right now.

Whether there would be "proper" way of building/installing and maintaining the software in the system using packaging is (my pure guess) is up to original developers of the software (salome, code-aster, opencascade etc) and, up to some extent, us — users.

I guess, its a hell of a job to do proper deb-ianization, but it should be feasible, and having CAE-software repository would be great...

I do not know much about proper packaging, but it looks like number of them is already available. I took a look at Aster: aster-full-src-10.0.3-2.noarch.tar.gz (as downloaded from www.code-aster.org)

[code:1]
Component : version : Packaged in Ubuntu? : Remarks

'Numeric' : '24.2' : 9.04/24.2 :
'aster' : '10.0.3' : - : GPL v2 or later
'aster-src' : '10.0.3' : - :
'astk' : '1.7.4' : - : GPL v2 + remark
'eficas' : '1.16.0' : - : GPL v2 or later
'eficas_doc' : '1.16.0' : - : License?
'gibi' : '2000' : - : License? Binary-only
'gmsh' : '2.2.6' : 9.04/2.2.6 :
'grace' : '5.1.21' : 9.04/5.1.22-1 :
'hdf5' : '1.6.5' : 9.04/1.6.6 : LAM/MPICH/OpenMPI/serial versions are available
'homard' : '9.5' : - : License? Binary only. The free downloading of HOMARD software is only allowed for coupling with Code_Aster. For any other use, a license agreement is requested.
'med' : '2.3.5' : - : LGPL 2.1
'metis-edf' : '4.1' : - : License? Copyright 1998, Regents of the University of Minnesota. + EDF adaptations, parmetis
'mumps' : '4.7.3' : - : Public domain.
'omniORB' : '4.1.3' : 9.04/4.1.2 :
'omniORBpy' : '3.3' : 9.04/3.2 :
'pylotage' : '2.0.4' : - : License?
'scotch' : '4.0' : 9.04/5.0.6 : LGPL 2.1 Scotch/Metis compatility interface is also available as package.
'tcl' : '8.4.5' : 9.04/8.4.19-2 : 8.5 also available
'tcl-src' : '8.4.5' : see above :
'tk' : '8.4.5' : 9.04/8.4.19-2 :
'tk-src' : '8.4.5' : see above :[/code:1]

If to go further, and take a look at building Salome-Meca... OpenCascade 6.3.0 (do not know exactly which sp) and other required components have been packaged as well already.

It also looks like there is a fine separation to possible packages in place. But you are right, it requires time and effort to learn how to make packages and actually make them.

Yep, there is checkinstall.

In my experience, it is handy to make packages from the sources on your machine. It tries its best to get it right and produces something working and suitable for packaging system (easier to remove is the biggest profit you get). And for simple programs/libraries using straightforward and standard installation commands it usually works. If there are some "non-trivial" steps involved in actual install procedure like extra scripts changing permissions during make install, for example, it fails (or, of course, I just did not know on a number of occasions how to force it to work).

Further on, as I mentioned above, produced packages are normally tied to current state of OS on your machine (i.e. installed libraries and utilities), and most probably will fail to install or run on other systems, since it does not care about dependencies, for example, if you don't do any extra tweaking... Which brings it back to "proper" packaging, I believe.

-- Added 2009/08/04 around 13:30

Just took a look at Aster build/deployment system. Looks like in-house replacement of functions provided by various configuring/building/packaging systems with a nice option to provide installation possibilities for people, who do not have administrative rights on their systems, which is weird.

Tried, as per documentation, some things like:
python setup.py --aster_root=./some-folder hdf5 med
which failed on testing libblas/liblapack availability (packaged and available in libblas-dev, liblapack-dev), which looks strange, since hdf5 and med do not seem needing those. So, stopped here.

Went to check directly on med-2.3.5. Which uses standard configure/make/make install

Got it pass ./configure and building with the following extra packages installed (on 9.04 with a lot of extras like build-essentials and some libraries already installed):
* libhdf5-serial-dev (libhdf5-openmpi-dev also available, did not check this variant, since do not know whether it is needed at all)
* hdf5-tools

Also I skipped ./configure warning about missing Tk interpreter and inability to do smth, since I do not care about this at the moment, but it could be handled during packaging by recommending proper Tk interpreter.

Currently wondering, how to test automatically (is it possible at all?) what was built in med-2.3.5. Tests seem to be available. But do not know how to run and verify proper functionality.<br /><br />Post edited by: Alexey Balmashnov, at: 2009/08/04 14:38