Hi Nicolas,

 

Python 3.6 is indeed a hard requirement. Firedrake uses f strings which aren’t part of Python 3.5 so you’ll get syntax errors if you use 3.5. If you don’t have root on a machine then it’s fairly simple to just build Python from source, and in fact that’s what we do on the UK national supercomputer. Python provide instructions for doing this: https://docs.python.org/3/using/unix.html Our Python build script for ARCHER, which might be a useful reference but does contain a lot of system-specific details, is here: https://github.com/firedrakeproject/firedrake-archer/blob/master/build_python3.7_archer.sh

 

Regards,

 

David

 

From: <firedrake-bounces@imperial.ac.uk> on behalf of Karin&NiKo <niko.karin@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, 15 October 2020 at 09:33
To: Lawrence Mitchell <wence@gmx.li>
Cc: firedrake <firedrake@imperial.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: [firedrake] Troubles when trying to update firedrake

 

And an extra question : do you have some experience on how to set-up a python version (say 3.6.5) on a computer on which you do not have root privileges that could be used in roder to build firedrake?

 

 

 

Le jeu. 15 oct. 2020 à 08:53, Karin&NiKo <niko.karin@gmail.com> a écrit :

Mmm... No it does not help. I see that python3.5.3 is used in my firedrake install since it is the default python3 version on my computer. 

Is python3.6 *really* mandatory?

 

Nicolas

 

Le mer. 14 oct. 2020 à 18:42, Lawrence Mitchell <wence@gmx.li> a écrit :

> On 14 Oct 2020, at 15:49, Karin&NiKo <niko.karin@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Firedrakers,
>
> I installed firedrake with the following options few months ago :
> python3 firedrake-install --disable-ssh --mpiexec mpirun.openmpi --mpicc mpicc.openmpi --mpicxx mpicxx.openmpi --mpif90 mpif90.openmpi
>
> I am now trying to update the code. So I am activating the virtualenv and I run : firedrake-update
> I then get the error :
> Running firedrake-update --verbose
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "firedrake-update", line 1254, in <module>
>     mpiexec_loc = shutil.which(args.mpiexec)
> AttributeError: 'Namespace' object has no attribute 'mpiexec'

This error is that the "args" object has no "mpiexec" attribute. I'm not sure how that happens.

Does it help to try and recover from a broken update script following the advice here:

https://www.firedrakeproject.org/download.html#recovering-from-a-broken-installation-script

Lawrence