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geodynamics / aspect

A parallel, extensible finite element code to simulate convection in both 2D and 3D models.
https://aspect.geodynamics.org/
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Unify the MacOS installation instructions #2582

Open gassmoeller opened 6 years ago

gassmoeller commented 6 years ago

The manual and the wiki are not consistent about how to install ASPECT for MacOS (compiling from scratch yourself vs using candi vs using the .dmg image. We need to settle on a method and consistently advertise it, because the current state confuses users.

So is the .dmg image our official way of installing it, or would people advocate for candi or spack?

naliboff commented 6 years ago

The issue with the .dmg is that the deal.II v9.0.0 .dmg is only compatible with a version of Xcode available on the latest OS X release. However, as long as the right version of Xcode is available it is fairly user friendly option.

No experience with trying candi or spack on a mac, but spack does sound very appealing in terms of clearly specifying what the dependencies are.

bangerth commented 6 years ago

The downside of spack is that it compiles everything and that might take a very long time. For people not yet used to dealing with compiling packages themselves, it is clearly the more complicated and off-putting way.

We could advertise both and clearly mark them as "The easy way" and "If you are interested in and experienced with playing with software projects". This way the expectations are clear.

jvanhunen commented 5 years ago

I never managed to install aspect on a Mac properly when Xcode was installed. After running cmake command to install aspect, I always manually remove all occurrences like '/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/...' in the files that cmake produced, before running make. I recently decided to completely remove Xcode from my Mac, reinstalled deal.ii (version 9.0.0) with the dmg package, and installation of aspect now all goes well.

naliboff commented 5 years ago

@jvanhunen - Interesting, I always thought the deal.II dmg required the Xcode compilers. Do you know by chance what compilers the deal.II dmg is using? Regardless, good to know it worked without Xcode and the installation was successful.