revive this package

[koehlerson]

Hey there,
I think the purpose of this package is extremely valuable and instead of attaching it to one specific FE framework we should (IMHO) just ship gmsh binaries and access to the gmsh.jl. If julia FE Frameworks want to support conversion than they should be able to make a PR with given conversion functions. What do you think about this?

[mipals]

Hi there,
I just wanted to say that I agree with you Maximilian. A revival of this package would definitely be appreciated as it has uses outside of just a FE framework.

[ahojukka5]

+1 from me also. Indeed this package would be useful for a lot of different FEM packages. The binaries are built in another repo (https://github.com/ahojukka5/GmshBuilder), and that time I did it according to the instructions provided by BinaryBuilder. I'm not sure if things have been changed from then?

[koehlerson]

I'm almost through the building process with the binarybuilder wizard. Afterwards I can check if something changed. Initially I asked because of this #14
This sounded to me as if something went wrong with libgmsh.

[mipals]

Seems like you're already on top of things @koehlerson . My problems with the package was/is failures when building on Julia nightly - windows-latest (the error can be seen below)

ERROR: Error building Gmsh:
ERROR:` LoadError: Your platform ("x86_64-w64-mingw32", parsed as "x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc8-cxx11") is not supported by this package!

Let me know if there is anything I can help with.

[koehlerson]

Ye already encountered this. I guess @ahojukka5 had the same problem with the binarybuilder.jl procedure and thus excluded the build. Cygwin build expects a different lib name. If we get a up to date building version, we can register it in yggdrasil and ask there for help w.r.t. cygwin builds on windows

[songhanzhang]

I have the same issue:

julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 1.5.3
Commit 788b2c77c1 (2020-11-09 13:37 UTC)
Platform Info:
OS: Windows (x86_64-w64-mingw32)
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) E-2236 CPU @ 3.40GHz
WORD_SIZE: 64
LIBM: libopenlibm
LLVM: libLLVM-9.0.1 (ORCJIT, skylake)
Environment:
JULIA_EDITOR = "C:\Users\Songhan\AppData\Local\atom\app-1.53.0\atom.exe" -a
JULIA_NUM_THREADS = 6

[koehlerson]

this is expected because: https://github.com/ahojukka5/GmshBuilder/blob/master/build_tarballs.jl#L30-L33
windows is excluded from the supported platforms for now.

I guess that it is excluded because the library won't be found under cygwin build, since its named differently under windows. In unix based stuff its named libgmsh while under windows it is gmsh.dll

to fix this we need to pass a vector of possible options as done here: https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil/blob/029965f93f1fe28fd9f3f6fe62cc4e04464dbfc1/P/PROJ/build_tarballs.jl#L54

[koehlerson]

Here is the PR to yggdrasil such that we have a jll for all platforms: JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil#2322

if it's merged we'll see a new repo in https://github.com/JuliaBinaryWrappers/ named gmsh

[koehlerson]

here is the new _jll repo https://github.com/JuliaBinaryWrappers/gmsh_jll.jl

[mipals]

Perfect! Is the idea to have gmsh_jll.jl provide the binaries and this package provide the gmsh.jl from the original gmsh library? Or is to only have the gmsh_jll.jl package?

[koehlerson]

So the idea of yggdrasil is that we provide there build_tarball scripts with a nice CI that checks for us if every platform can compile the binaries. If this is succesfull and merged into yggdrasil (which happily was done yesterday) another CI service is triggered which creates the gmsh_jll.jl repo that hosts everything to get the binaries working. So, in the end we say using gmsh_jll which exports the const libgmsh and use this instead of lib in the current gmsh dev api. If you want to, we can work here together:https://github.com/koehlerson/gmsh.jl

I just included gmsh_jll and copy pasted the gmsh api with slight changes. I think it would be nice if we could make it further julian by refactoring things such that the blue style convention is fulfilled. I just tested the script in the README with the gmsh_jll and it works for me. If you use any thing other than arch, we can already test other binaries.

Edit: I chatted about this with more experienced users. It makes more sense to keep the api as it is and construct something higher level in a submodule or something similar

[fredrikekre]

Bump @ahojukka5 , there is now https://github.com/koehlerson/gmsh.jl and also https://github.com/WaveProp/GmshSDK and it would be good to combine efforts.

If you don't have time to work on this, would it be possible to give some more people access to this repository?