[Dune-devel] Improvements on Alberta

[Christoph Grüninger]

Hi Dune,

as discussed in our developer meeting earlier this year, I forked 
Justus' Alberta Git repository and put it to GitLab.com [1]. Over almost 
two months and 80 commits, I tried to get Alberta and its build system 
into a better shape. It is far from perfect, but I think it is likely to 
stay compilable for another five years or so. I feel confident enough to 
make an Alberta 3.1.0 release soon. But first I want to give you the 
chance to test, give feedback, or create a merge request.

What did I do:
- I forked the project, it is now hosted at GitLab. If you want, I give 
you maintainer rights.
- GitLab offers computation time for CI/CD runners. I set up 5 different 
images (2x Debian, 2x openSuse, 1x Ubuntu LTS) that compile the library.
- Alberta comes with a couple of executables, some are related to a book 
from 2005. I turned most of them into tests. Make check builds them and 
runs a part of them as a poor man's regression test suite.
- I updated the Autotools build system - yikes, it took me some strength 
not trying to convert it to CMake - and it is back to be buildable on 
various Linux distributions.
- On my way, I sometimes took a shortcut, to not spending to much time 
on less important parts. For several shortcomings I documented what 
could be improved in issues.

Open points:
- With Debian 12 / Sid tirpc does not work out of the box, see issue #4 [2].
- When compiling the tests from dune-grid, it fails because it requires 
libltdl. I have not yet figured out, if this is my setup, a regression 
due to my changes, or revealed a bug in dune-grid's build system.

Any feedback is welcome!

Bye
Christoph

[1] https://gitlab.com/alberta-fem/alberta3
[2] https://gitlab.com/alberta-fem/alberta3/-/issues/4

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                        [Emmanuel Macron, 2022]