.deb from CAELinux 2009

Thank you for your feedback

For CheckInstall, I have seen that one can also specify dependencies and pre/post install or removal scripts for the package to be built, which in fact would result in a proper "distributable" package.But for sure, without the dependencies, it could not be distributed on an heterogeneous set of configurations.

Then, one need to figure out which system libraries will be used for compiling and add proper dependencies; this is usually not so complicated as most developers list the required libraries in the documentation.

Finally for pre/post installation scripts, if we continue to install the CAE codes in /opt (safer way of proceeding if we need to manually "clean" an installation), it would mostly consist in changing access rights and ownership, and adding a few lines in bashrc to define the proper environment variables (and add gnome menu entries).

One can also specify "conflicting" / replacement packages if I understood it right, so it could also be used to "update" (=replace) the package. Unfortunatelly, I could not find much feedback on how CheckInstall should be used to build 100% "valid" package that could also be upgraded and so on... So it would require some testing.

For the official Debian packaging procedure, I don't know if I understand it right but it seems mostly done for single components that can be compiled with the traditionnal ./configure,./make,./make install. I can't figure out how to adapt this procedure to programs that use complex compile/install scripts like Aster or Saturne's setup.py which mostly automate everything in their own way (but it works really well!!).

Concerning your trial building aster on 9.04, if I remember correctly, you should install python-dev, python-numeric, lapack3-dev, atlas3-base-dev, gcc, gfortran (or g77 on 32bit systems), bison, flex, tcl8.4-dev, tk8.4-dev, xterm

and then run the "full" setup.py which compiles/install everything.

But to make it more "debian friendly", instead of trying to build MED (which is the default option), you could edit setup.cfg to specify the path to the system MED library (med-2.3.x). Unfortunatelly, I don't know if the current MED package for Ubuntu is up to date...

For more details on how to build Aster in Ubuntu, see
www.code-aster.org/wiki/doku.php
in Section En(glish)=>Code_Aster installation

Good luck<br /><br />Post edited by: Administrator, at: 2009/08/04 16:12

Yes the Libmed package is outdated... If you want to update the package, starting from the existing source package, it should not be too complicated... at least from what I have read in Debian Packaging Docs but I have no experience...

Unfortunatelly, I have no proceedure to test MED alone, actually I have always compiled all Aster products in a row and test the final executabel... I know that there are a few tools provided with the med sources, like &quot;dump&quot; or something like that. Maybe you can test the library by building these tools (=test that the library is well formed) and execute the tool on a small &quot;test&quot; MED file (=check if you have runtime errors...). I suppose that the tools correspond to the libmed-tools package in the system repository.