Scientific Software for OpenIndiana-SFE

Why ?

OpenIndiana is a neat operating system providing a stable working environment for a researcher/engineer:

• ZFS can be used to setup a raidz on the workstation useful for snapshots and crucial for data consistency,
• Good quality of the packaging and userland,
• Respect of standards (not only GNU) inherited from Solaris,
• Good performance with Intel and Nvidia graphic cards,
• Full 32/64 bit environment useful for testing purposes.
• ...

Unfortunately the lack of visibility on the internet suggests that it's difficult to use on a daily basis (plain wrong): as long as you have a working compiler and you are able to handle some GNU-ism issues, it's not different than any other UNIX-like system. Nonetheless packaging of scientific software is lagging a bit behind, thus this small contribution... merely a sandbox for testing spec files but which could hopefully prove useful.

How to contribute ?

Your level of contribution may vary depending on the time you can dedicate and your background (developer, system administrator, end user), but any contribution is valuable !

1. Submitting a request for adding a spec file

If you are end user and need a specific package, you can request addition a a spec file. As it takes time to write the metadata of a spec file, the requirements are, assuming that the package is 'foobar':

Copy the template file

• copy the SFEsinglearch1.spec file to SFEfoobar.spec
• change the name from 'singlearch1' to the name of the package (lower case), 'foobar' in our case.

Modify the metadata fields

• Name:

It should be prefixed by SFE and followed by a name composed of lowercase letters and dash.

         Name:                                   SFEfoobar

• IPS package name:

         IPS_Package_Name: library/singlearch

• Version:

The version should be a combination of digits and dot, no letters.

         Version:                1.0.1

• Source:

The "Source" directive consists of a link used to fetch the source tarball. For later reuse, you can define the source name in a macro as shown below.

         %define srcname Foobar
         Source:                http://www.foobar.example.com/dist/%{srcname}-%{version}.tar.gz

• Summary:

         Summary:            Foobar bogus library for newcomers

• Group:

The OpenSolaris 2008 classification scheme is covered at http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E21383/glyhp.html#scrolltoc and http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E21383/gentextid-3283.html#scrolltoc

         Group:                Utility

• URL:

The home page of the project.

         URL:                   http://www.foobar.example.com

• License:

Usual values are: CDDL, GPL, GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, BSD 2-Clause, BSD 3-Clause, Cecill C, MIT ...

         License:             BSD

Add a description

         %description
         The Foobar libary is a bogus package used as example to provide guidelines for writing spec files

Modify the %prep stage

Usually the following lines are sufficient.

         %prep
         setup -q -n %{srcname}-%{version}

The argument given to '-n' should match the name of the source directory after the tarball has been uncompressed. Change it if required.

2. Submitting a working spec file

!TBD!

• %files:

The Solaris filesystem hiearchy is described by man -s 5 filesystem

Guidelines

• Setting up a build zone for pkgbuild
• Writing spec files
• Managing MPI implementation
• Packaging Java components
• Packaging TeXLive
• Porting Issues

Packages processed

Categories

• NCM : Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• DF : Data Format
• HPC: High Performance Computing
• LA : Linear Algebra
• VGP: Visualization, Graphics and Postprocessing
• (foo) : Dependency of foo

List by alphabetical order

Packages wanted