Re: [netcdfgroup] Compiling netcdf-fortran with Auto Builders (eg Spack)

• To: Elizabeth Fischer <rpf2116@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Re: [netcdfgroup] Compiling netcdf-fortran with Auto Builders (eg Spack)
• From: Ward Fisher <wfisher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2016 20:20:21 -0700

Hello,

I’ll take a stab at answering this, but I’ll start by saying that I haven’t
heard of Spack. I’ll read up on it, but for now I can’t really comment
about it or which POV is more correct. Regarding your questions, however:

   1. I’m curious to hear any opinions that people have about Spack .
   2. No plans to move away from autotools; cmake is not ubiquitous enough
   to assume people have it handy, and we do not want to force people to
   install a new build system just to compile netCDF.
   3. It should be available in cmake using the
   ENABLE_REMOTE_FORTRAN_BOOTSTRAP option, although I would believe you if
   you told me it wasn’t working (I’m on a tablet right now and can’t check).
   4. I added the remote bootstrap as an afternoon’s project/experiment, to
   gauge interest. As I recall, it was on the heels of a discussion re: “why
   was the fortran interface split from the C library, and can they be merged
   again?” (the answers are a) long story b) no). At the time I thought that,
   if there was demand, I could invest time in adding something similar for
   the C++ interface. Honestly, though, there really hasn’t been a lot of
   discussion about it.

Sorry I can’t comment about Spack, but hopefully I’ve answered your
questions or at least provided a bit of context.

Thanks all,

-Ward

On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 7:54 PM, Elizabeth Fischer <rpf2116@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Hello,
>
> We've had a lively discussion over at Spack on how best to build
> netcdf-fortran with an auto-builder such as Spack (which are the future; I
> noticed that building just NetCDF now involves 7 dependencies).
>
> https://github.com/LLNL/spack/pull/466
>
> The two points of view are:
>
>  a) Use ./configure --enable-remote-fortran-bootstrap to build the C and
> Fortran libraries from the plain netcdf Spack package.
>
>  b) Build one Spack package for netcdf, and another for netcdf-fortran.
>
> Questions:
>
> *) Would anyone here care to comment on that issue?
> *) I noticed that NetCDF has adopted CMake.  Is there a sense of migration
> away from Autotools?
> *) If so, are there plans to support --enable-remote-fortran-bootstrap in
> CMake?
> *) Why is --enable-remote-fortran-bootstrap provided for Fortran, but not
> C++
>
> Thank you,
> -- Elizabeth
>
>
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• References:
  • [netcdfgroup] Compiling netcdf-fortran with Auto Builders (eg Spack)
    • From: Elizabeth Fischer