Cactus should not interpret environment variables as configuration options

[Ian Hinder]

Currently, if you have the variable HDF5_DIR set in your shell startup file, Cactus will interpret this as a configuration option and will override whatever is set in your optionlist.

This behaviour occurs because the "make" utility allows you to specify options on the command line which are then converted into environment variables. This is a method for overriding options on the command line.

However, the fact that variables from the user's environment are also overriding the optionlist is very undesirable. It would be good if this could be fixed somehow.

This ticket is in response to #100.

Keyword:

[Erik Schnetter]

One good way around this would be to rewrite the top-level Cactus makefile in Python. This top-level makefile does not use any real make facilities; it only parses the command and then calls the corresponding "real" makefile in the lib/make directory.

Rewriting this makefile should be straightforward. I began to do this some time ago; I attach the current state of my efforts.

[anonymous]

Replacing the Makefile is not a bad idea, but I am not so sure using python would be the best option. Given how many problems we see with simfactory and different versions of python being installed (or not) one various systems, one would have to be very careful and test a lot. The logic isn't all that complicated, and the rest of the build system is in perl anyway - IHMO it would make most sense to have the global "Makefile" in perl as well.