On 05/11/18 20:22, Mayuresh wrote:
It sounds like you work[ed] in a large organization with a lot of scientific computing going on. In a place like that, there's plenty of expertise to go around. The sites that have no IT support tend to be the small ones, where there may be only one or a few people doing computational science in a given department and all they know is Windows and Mac. I'm trying to help people in placesOn Fri, May 11, 2018 at 04:54:55PM -0500, Jason Bacon wrote:I'm approaching this with 18 years of experience supporting research computing, knowing what researchers tend to struggle with and what they can do well. These are intelligent people, but most have not had attention to detail beaten into them to the extent that we have. They tend to make a lot of mistakes with CLIs because they're used to more forgiving interfaces, so I aim to provide a more fool-proof interface if I'm suggesting that they do something for themselves.I do not have much problem with the suggestion of "contrib" type utilities suggested. But I do find above account on skill level of scientists a bit surprising. I'd humbly submit to have more than couple of decades of experience with a research organization in various positions, various groups, including teams largely of biologist to give one example. While the computing skill levels vary, in whatever I have experienced, a good proportion of researchers love command line interfaces, most use Linux on their laptops and can follow instructions from well written documents. There will always be at least be some colleagues around to approach to in peculiar situations unclear to someone. I don't insist that all research organizations / researches are the same. But I'd be certainly surprised if at least a few individuals in every work group can't do these things well.
like this benefit from pkgsrc.
There's a lot more to it that just running the bootstrap script with default values. Deciding which snapshot to download, unpacking, choosing a suitable partition to install on, selecting appropriate bootstrap flags, editing mk.conf to use gfortran instead of g95, a newer base compiler on Enterprise Linux, etc. The default g95 won't even compile many modern Fortran programs and produces far slower code than a modern gfortran. On Enterprise Linux, which many researchers have to use in order to run commercial software, the stock compiler from Yum is outdated and will cause a lot of build failures, so we need to force use of a newer compiler, e.g.'but the bootstrap process was way beyond the average scientist's skill level.cd /usr/pkgsrc/bootstrap ./bootstrap
.if empty(PKGPATH:Marchivers/bzip2) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Marchivers/pax) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Marchivers/xz) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mconverters/help2man) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mconverters/p5-Unicode-EastAsianWidth) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/autoconf) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/gettext-lib) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/gettext-tools) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/gmp) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/gtexinfo) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/libtool-base) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/m4) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/ncurses) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/nbpatch) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mdevel/p5-gettext) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mlang/gcc5) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mlang/gcc5-libs) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mlang/perl5) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mmath/cloog) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mmath/isl) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mmath/mpcomplex) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mmath/mpfr) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mmisc/p5-Locale-libintl) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mpkgtools/cwrappers) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mpkgtools/digest) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mpkgtools/pkg_install-info) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Msysutils/checkperms) && \ empty(PKGPATH:Mtextproc/p5-Text-Unidecode) GCC_REQD+=5.0 .endif # GCC_REQDThe auto-pkgsrc-setup script does most of this for you (and continues to be improved).