Hi, I would like to eventually package the Lethe CFD library [1], but it requires a version of dealii compiled with Trilinos, which is not currently available in Guix.
PETSc and Trilinos (and many other libraries available in Guix) can be compiled with several different options. What is the standard way to deal with this in Guix? >From what I can tell, in general the packages get a reasonable default and people who require different options make a channel and inherit from the base package, and in some really practical cases we get a variant of the package with a similar name, e.g., dealii-openmpi. The potential problem with PETSc and Trilinos when it comes to dealii is that some of the optional modules they can be compiled with are the same, which causes trouble when dealii is configured with both of them [2]. (From what I can tell, the module in question is not configured in the Guix package for PETSc, so this point may be moot.) I'm wondering what the best way would be to add Trilinos to the dealii packages (assuming I manage to package Trilinos as well). In other words, which would be best among the following: - Build Trilinos with a reasonable configuration for dealii [3] and update the dealii and dealii-openmpi packages to include it (if the problem mentioned above turns out not to be an issue). This assumes people won't mind having to build Trilinos as a dependency for dealii even if they don't need it. - Build Trilinos as above but add separate packages for the resulting dealii, e.g., dealii-trilinos, dealii-trilinos-openmpi. This seems like it would get awkward quite quickly, which is why assuming my thoughts on the purposes of channels are correct, this is the inferior option. - Abandon all hope and just maintain a channel for dealii configured with Trilinos (the inferiorer option :)). - Some other possibility I have not thought of. Thank you and best regards, Paul [1]: https://github.com/lethe-cfd/lethe [2]: https://www.dealii.org/current/external-libs/petsc.html [3]: https://www.dealii.org/current/external-libs/trilinos.html