The FreeBSD `metis` port has undergone a major, possibly incompatible revision
From the Slack thread:
FYI, the FreeBSD
metis4
port is gone is the latest quarterly port set. There is now ametis
port, which is Metis version 5. Anyone care to speculate whether that is going to cause problems? I thought it was used withassign
, but apparently it is onlyassign_prepass
andipassign
.
@ricci thought them no longer used, though I verified that we have classic experiments (none in the last 10 years), that will use them do to magical DB settings in the experiments
table. @stoller says ipassign
is not used through the portal path, though assign_prepass
(via mapper
) might be.
The new port does cause problems:
It looks like at least
assign_prepass
is still used. It uses thekmetis
command line tool and that tool is now gone. According to the manual (http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/fetch/sw/metis/manual.pdf, search for "kmetis"),gpmetis
is the direct replacement command, but I don't have any idea if it behaves the same without any additional options.
I should add that
ipassign
is also technically still used, but it has to be specified explicitly in an ns file and there are only a handful of experiments that do that--none swapped in in the last 10 years. But we don't have a better solution for large, complex topos, we just punt on them now.ipassign
links withmetis
libraries and we have already discovered that they moved include files around which breaks the build. Who knows what has changed in the API.
Looks like mapper has to be invoked with "-x", or the experiment flagged with "useprepass", in order for assign_prepass to be called. There are no instances of the former, and though there are three experiments with the "useprepass" column set, I see no path in our code through which that field can ever be set!