Scipts for FEniCS-based tutorials need to be modified because the `fenics-dolfin` package no longer exists

[IshaanDesai]

The fenics-dolfin PyPI package seems to no longer exist on the packaging index. An alternative way to install legacy FEniCS needs to be provided for all relevant participants.

[MakisH]

Since we discussed why this has not been discovered earlier, PIP does cache packages locally (+ our tests cache Docker layers).

In the system tests (example run):

solid-fenics-1    | WARNING: Skipping /usr/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/pybind11-2.11.1.dist-info due to invalid metadata entry 'name'
solid-fenics-1    | Collecting fenicsprecice~=2.0 (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))
solid-fenics-1    |   Downloading fenicsprecice-2.2.0.tar.gz (41 kB)
solid-fenics-1    |      ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 41.5/41.5 kB 1.7 MB/s eta 0:00:00
solid-fenics-1    |   Preparing metadata (setup.py): started
solid-fenics-1    |   Preparing metadata (setup.py): finished with status 'done'
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: numpy<2,>1 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 2)) (1.26.4)
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: fenics-dijitso~=2019.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 6)) (2019.2.0.dev0)
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: fenics-dolfin~=2019.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 7)) (2019.2.0.64.dev0)
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: fenics-ffc~=2019.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 8)) (2019.2.0.dev0)
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: fenics-fiat~=2019.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 9)) (2019.2.0.dev0)
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: fenics-ufl-legacy~=2022.0 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from -r requirements.txt (line 10)) (2022.3.0)
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: mpi4py<4 in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from fenicsprecice~=2.0->-r requirements.txt (line 1)) (3.1.5)
solid-fenics-1    | Collecting pyprecice>=3.0.0.0 (from fenicsprecice~=2.0->-r requirements.txt (line 1))
solid-fenics-1    |   Using cached pyprecice-3.3.1-cp312-cp312-linux_x86_64.whl
solid-fenics-1    | Collecting scipy (from fenicsprecice~=2.0->-r requirements.txt (line 1))
solid-fenics-1    |   Downloading scipy-1.16.3-cp312-cp312-manylinux2014_x86_64.manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl.metadata (62 kB)
solid-fenics-1    |      ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 62.0/62.0 kB 4.0 MB/s eta 0:00:00
solid-fenics-1    | Requirement already satisfied: petsc4py in /usr/lib/petsc/lib/python3/dist-packages (from fenics-dolfin~=2019.0->-r requirements.txt (line 7)) (3.19.6)
solid-fenics-1    | Downloading scipy-1.16.3-cp312-cp312-manylinux2014_x86_64.manylinux_2_17_x86_64.whl (35.7 MB)
solid-fenics-1    |    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 35.7/35.7 MB 73.3 MB/s eta 0:00:00
solid-fenics-1    | Building wheels for collected packages: fenicsprecice
solid-fenics-1    |   Building wheel for fenicsprecice (setup.py): started
solid-fenics-1    |   Building wheel for fenicsprecice (setup.py): finished with status 'done'
solid-fenics-1    |   Created wheel for fenicsprecice: filename=fenicsprecice-2.2.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl size=23002 sha256=0c2c2819736e8d0867b698a3e3657784a282bf66facd92ab2ebd50257936202c
solid-fenics-1    |   Stored in directory: /home/precice/.cache/pip/wheels/8d/7f/08/0285512b515a977554739575baeb844b2359baba1fd937842a
solid-fenics-1    | Successfully built fenicsprecice
solid-fenics-1    | WARNING: Skipping /usr/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/pybind11-2.11.1.dist-info due to invalid metadata entry 'name'
solid-fenics-1    | Installing collected packages: scipy, pyprecice, fenicsprecice
solid-fenics-1    | Successfully installed fenicsprecice-2.2.0 pyprecice-3.3.1 scipy-1.16.3
solid-fenics-1    | WARNING: Skipping /usr/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/pybind11-2.11.1.dist-info due to invalid metadata entry 'name'
solid-fenics-1    | Calling FFC just-in-time (JIT) compiler, this may take some time.
solid-fenics-1    | Calling FFC just-in-time (JIT) compiler, this may take some time.
solid-fenics-1    | ---[precice]  This is preCICE version 3.3.0
solid-fenics-1    | ---[precice]  Revision info: v3.3.0-29-gc8568650
solid-fenics-1    | ---[precice]  Build type: Release + debug log + assertions
solid-fenics-1    | ---[precice]  Working directory "/runs/flow-over-heated-plate_fluid-openfoam-solid-fenics_2025-11-17-053443/solid-fenics"
solid-fenics-1    | ---[precice]  Configuring preCICE with configuration "/runs/flow-over-heated-plate_fluid-openfoam-solid-fenics_2025-11-17-053443/solid-fenics/../precice-config.xml"

In a fresh container, this is indeed failing:

root@d604e7b75e24:/mnt/host# .venv/bin/python -m pip install fenics-dolfin~=2019.0
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement fenics-dolfin~=2019.0 (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for fenics-dolfin~=2019.0

Strange to have a package removed. Do you know the motivation?

[IshaanDesai]

Do you know the motivation?

There were problems with the package for a while already. I guess the developers decided to simply remove this package, as there are Debian and conda packages for FEniCSx now. I am surprised that @BenjaminRodenberg did not run into this issue because he was doing some experiments with legacy FEniCS recently.