VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 09 2006 - 13:30:59 CST

Bogdan,
  Ah, now I understand the point you were making. As a means of testing
the builds on multiple distros, something like VMWare or xen etc is probably
a huge help. I'd just need to have time to setup all of the client OS
installations under the hypervisor OS (whether VMWare or whatever).
One thing that's kept me away from doing much with VMWare and similar
systems is that there's no support for OpenGL, so the best tests I'd likely
be able to do would be running scripts and checking for correct functioning
of the core VMD code. If I have time to install a test box I might give
that a spin and see how it does. Not all linux distros work within these
hypervisor VM setups from what I've heard, so that might also be an
interesting challenge all on its own. If anyone has such a VMWare or
xen setup running with 5 or 6 client Linux distros, I'd be curious to
hear your experiences.

Regarding source RPMs. One of the problems I'd have in doing something
that automated is that I've had to manually patch various bugs in FLTK,
Tcl, Tk, Python, etc so that they build correctly on some of the target
platforms. While my builds work, sometimes the standard distributions
of these libraries do not, at least not without patches, and so just having
a particular version requirement for FLTK/Tcl/Tk/Python may not be enough to
have a stable VMD build. Is there a nice way to have a patch get applied
to a required SRPM before it gets installed?

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 06:43:52PM +0100, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, John Stone wrote:
>
> > It takes a lot of testing to determine that a build of VMD is even
> > worth making available, and so one of the problems with adding
> > VMware and several new linux versions is that it assumes I'll have
> > time to test these additional builds,
>
> Well, I think that I didn't make my point clear enough: in the case of
> VMD, it would not only be for compiling, but also for testing against
> the various (versions of) dynamic libraries. By doing a diff between
> the various "ldd" outputs, you can spot mismatches (and you can even
> automate this small step) to help you discard binaries before you even
> attempt to run them, which would have helped in this specific case.
>
> > I would definitely like to make it easier for people to build VMD
> > from source code, so I'm willing to accept any suggestions that
> > would make the source distribution much easier to use.
>
> Well, I for one am very fond of building packages from source RPMs on
> Linux; it gives repeatability for compiles _and_ installs (including
> uninstalls !). If I could download source RPMs of VMD and the various
> libraries and just run for each of them
>
> "rpmbuild --rebuild package.src.rpm"
>
> then install them all (via a yum repository for example), then I would
> certainly do it. Today, I just download the binaries because it's much
> more convenient to place them in a centrally available directory to
> make them available to all computers; it's certainly much better than
> hunting for all the dependencies (and there for specific versions!)
> needed before even starting the compilation phase.
>
> The RPM packaging would also help with the versioning. If you tested
> in your environment with certain versions of Tcl, Tk, Python, etc.
> then you could require these specific versions (or a >= version,
> relying on backwards compatibility ;-)) for building a specific
> version of the VMD RPM.
>
> Debian users could also install the RPMs via "alien" and using
> "rpmcpio" files can be extracted from the RPM and installed as a
> normal tar.gz, in case you'd choose to produce only RPMs.
>
> --
> Bogdan Costescu
>
> IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
> Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
> Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
> E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu_at_IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De 

-- 
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