I installed deal.ii via spack and IDEs were unusable

[Drew Davidson]

Hi,

I am a beginner user.  This post is not a question; my intention is to share possibly helpful information with other beginners like me.

I installed deal.ii via spack, because the README for deal.ii made the manual installation look too hard and/or time-consuming, and I like conda in Python, and spack seemed similar to conda.  I started through the deal.ii video tutorials and got stuck in 7 and 8 with various problems in Eclipse; lots of things were not working.  I then tried Qt Creator.  The initial cmake step that runs automatically upon opening the CMakeLists.txt file in Qt Creator would not work, so I could do nothing with Qt Creator.  Everything worked in the terminal (no IDE, just terminal); only the IDEs were misbehaving.

I googled too much and tried different things, then realized it might be the choice of installing deal.ii via spack that is a problem.  I gave a try to installing deal.ii manually according to the README, and it wasn't as bad as I was afraid of in terms of time or effort.

I just went through video 7 with Qt Creator instead of Eclipse, and things work within Qt Creator so far.  I have not tried Eclipse again, since I only need one IDE.

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04.

I wonder if the very long file paths generated by spack are a problem.

Thanks,

D.D.

[Denis Davydov]

Hi,

I use Eclipse only for writing the code and compile everything from the terminal, so I can't really comment. 

But I am quite certain that some of my colleagues setup Eclipse also to build/run their codes with deal.II being installed by Spack.

Last time I was playing with building things from Eclipse, i had to set-up things as an external project with Makefile.

Then, as long as you do `cmake /path/to/sources/` then CMake generates Makefile and it should be absolutely irrelevant how the dependencies (dealii) of your executable/library are built, be it via Spack, Homebrew, Candi, etc. 

Regards,

Denis.

[Jean-Paul Pelteret]

Hi Drew,

I also use Spack, and configure each project in the manner that Denis says - I use an external project with a Makefile, setup a build directory as a subdirectory of my project and run CMake once through the command line. After doing that I can happily build my project in eclipse. To satisfy Eclipse’s code indexer, I also configure the include paths for the project. These are found if you right click on the project name in the navigator, go to properties and then C/C++ General -> Paths and Symbols -> Includes. I use filesystem views in Spack, so mine currently looks like this: <HOME_DIR>/Spack/views/<MY_VIEW_NAME>/include . Although the input path is shortened, I see after jumping into a header in the view Eclipse registers the full (non-symlinked) file path in the title bar.

Anyway, I’m glad to hear that you found a solution. Thanks very much for your feedback - we’re always looking for ways to improve the documentation and installation instructions. We’ll try to take what you’ve said into consideration.

Best regards,

Jean-Paul

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