[Gate-users] Gate v6.2 compilation with Macports

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Matthew Lewis wrote:
>
> the current installation guide seems to be Linux-centric….
>
> I found one post in the 2013 archive about building CLHEP manually under OSX
> Mountain Lion.
>
> Macports will successfully build CLHEP and Geant4. Has anyone successfully
> built Gate 6.2 using the dependencies from macports?
>
> Any pointers for building on OSX 10.8.x would be appreciated….

A bit more than a year ago I started playing with a Portfile for Gate.

It's not version 6.2, it's one of the latest versions from git
instead, but you can see the last version of the Portfile here:
    https://trac.macports.org/browser/users/mojca/ports/science/gate/Portfile
or the initial ticket (but ignore attachments which are old by now):
    https://trac.macports.org/ticket/35992

The port works for me, but needs a tiny bit of polishing before the
official inclusion into MacPorts trunk. For example, it should
probably not reference my personal (maybe even modified) clone of the
git repository from GitHub. I asked the Gate developers to create the
official repository on GitHub and offered assistance, but I suspect
they were too busy with other things then. The issue should probably
be raised again because it makes an enormous difference for MacPorts
whether (a clone of) the repository is available on GitHub or not.

Other than that:
- I was waiting for some tiny fixes of the code to be applied to
Gate's git repository (I didn't know about the issue that Jérôme
mentioned, but it is probably on the list of those that would need to
be applied for the port to work properly).
- I used many of Jérôme's patches, but I didn't dare to simply patch
Root or Geant4 at some places (some patches are not acceptable, for
example hard-coding Gate's "About" window in Geant4; and some I don't
understand).
- It would be great to get some feedback from anyone before the port
gets included.
- It's not a requirement, but it's nice to use official releases for
MacPorts. For a while I had a feeling that version 7.0 was short
before the release and I kind-of-planned to add Gate to MacPorts when
that happens, but I was wrong about the time plan of Gate 7.0. If
version 7.0 came out or if there was more interest or feedback, I
would probably have added the port to MacPorts already.

I spent a considerable amount of time creating new Geant4 ports
bringing some very significant (packaging) changes compared to 9.4,
but no single bug report came back, so I was assuming that there was
close-to-zero user base for Geant4 in MacPorts (probably also because
it was stuck at version 9.4 for too long and anyone with serious
interest in Geant4 might want to install multiple copies on his own
anyway). The Geant4 team actually fixed a number of issues and
implemented some new functionality in the Qt part of Geant4 and these
changes are already present in MacPorts. (The most welcome addition
for me was support for copy-pasting multiple lines to the Qt window
for example. Another "sugar" is that Gate is now displaying a toolbox
line on top.)

At the moment I'm also working with ROOT developers to fix problems
related to CMake-based packaging of ROOT. (They are actually very
actively fixing problems right now.)

If anyone is willing to test either ROOT or Gate in MacPorts from my
personal SVN branch
(https://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/users/mojca), I would
appreciate feedback a lot. As soon as there is enough consensus that
the port works as expected, I can put the port in trunk, so that it
will be available by default to every MacPorts user.

Mojca