corsika 8 hard to build on CentOS 7
The minimum required versions of several required packages are impossible to meet with packages from the CentOS distribution or the RedHat blessed Software Collections. The Software Collections are even recommended by CERN for getting up-to-date compilers, which makes them well-blessed.
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cmake: the version in the distribution is 2.8.12. One can get a
cmake3
package from EPEL, which provides a recent cmake, but as/usr/bin/cmake3
, which makes documentation harder. Also, sysadmins are generally reluctant to install software from EPEL on a production cluster. -
boost: The version in the distribution is 1.53.0. There might be something more recent in the COPR repositories, but that is personal software, not vetted by RedHat or Fedora, which makes it even less likely to get it installed by a sysadmin.
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eigen3: Not in the distribution, available in EPEL.
Production sites only transitioned recently from CentOS 6 or Scientific Linux 6 to CentOS 7. CentOS 8 will not happen at the production sites for some time.
It seems we have to find a way to help users to build cmake and boost locally for users on CentOS. We could also see if we can get a corsika distribution area in CVMFS. That would probably cover getting binaries to a lot of GRID (and affiliated) sites.