Geant4 & Gate: a new attempt & request for feedback

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

The Gate and Geant4 ports (in my personal SVN directory) are more or
less at the state where I wanted them to be. There is still some work
to be done, but the major issues have been dealt with.

Some questions/suggestions/problems are mentioned in TODO notes in the
Portfiles and some are in
    https://trac.macports.org/browser/users/mojca/notes

Some of the issues that need to be resolved before the release:

1.) Decide on a precise name for Geant4:
    - Should the main port be geant or geant4? (Probably geant4, but
that means that the old Geant4.9.4 needs to go "without a warning".)
    - Should the subport be geant4.9.6 or geant4-9.6? (Probably the first one.)

2.) Licence (currently called "Geant4", but might need a change)

3.) Not urgent, but would be nice: currently the port installs
/opt/local/libexec/Geant4/Geant4.9.6/geant4-config (I moved it there
on purpose to allow side-by-side installation of multiple versions).
This means that "port select" or something along the lines would be
needed to put a symlink into "bin". I also created
/opt/local/libexec/Geant4/Geant4.9.6/geant4data.sh to setup data
variables. This is a non-standard way to do it, but another symlink
from ${prefix}/bin/geant4.sh to that file should solve the issue, I
guess. The installed geant4.sh cannot be symlinked (it stops working),
it sets DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (which is probably undesirable) and PATH
(which is not needed if geant-config ends up in bin) and doesn't set
the data variables for 9.5.

Maybe a notice is needed saying that some file might need to be
sources to get all the necessary variables.

I don't know yet how to work with "port select".

4.) I need some help on deciding about the variant names in Geant4 and
I'm not sure if I got all the X11 dependencies right. Geant4 currently
links to /usr/X11/lib/libGL.1.dylib and I'm not sure if that's OK.

5.) Gate is available via a git repository, but that doesn't allow for
setting any checksum. I'm still linking to my own GitHub mirror and
trying to convince the Gate authors to put their own official mirror
to GitHub.

6.) I'm not sure what should be used as the version of Gate. The
latest released version was 6.2. The authors call the trunk version
"7.0 beta". My intention is to keep the port up to date (in sync with
git) on regular basis, at least until the first major release, so
maybe some epoch(?) is needed? Or is it OK to simply keep increasing
the revision on regular basis? (The version 6.2 would need too many
patches to make it worth the effort.)


So ... any feedback would be most welcome. I would really like to make
Gate available as soon as it would be reasonable. Minor glitches can
always be corrected later if needed.

Thank you,
    Mojca

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 4:07 PM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have created another attempt of portfiles for Geant4 and Gate, see:
> - https://trac.macports.org/browser/users/mojca/ports/science/geant/Portfile
> - https://trac.macports.org/browser/users/mojca/ports/science/gate/Portfile
>
> I used a great deal of hardcoding different paths, running unusual
> commands ... and I bet that the ports could be simplified & improved
> in many ways. I'm a novice in writing Portfiles.
>
> I wasn't able to make Gate a subport of Geant4, mainly because of
> GitHub portgroup (it's not exactly clear to me what goes wrong - there
> is no error reported, but something goes wrong during portindex and
> geant4-gate isn't known at the end). Honestly I would prefer if Gate
> was a separate port, but sharing the variables would sometimes help.
>
> I would be grateful for any feedback & suggestions.
>
> The ports are not finished yet, but they seem to be usable. I'm
> currently going through patches mentioned on http://suhard.fr/gate/,
> I'm submitting bug reports to Geant4 & communicating with the Gate
> community to polish out different aspects of the program etc. Gate is
> not yet fully compatible with Geant4 9.6.p02, but that issue is being
> worked on.

Clarification: I didn't stumble on any problems yet, this is a claim
by Gate authors. Any patches they plan to submit can easily be
incorporated by changing the git's sha sum.

> iAIDA doesn't compile at all (but it did not so long ago).

This has been fixed in the meantime.