Re: [boost] [EXTERNAL] Re: Request for a "Policy Review" regarding 'CMakeLists.txt'

Subject: Re: [boost] [EXTERNAL] Re: Request for a "Policy Review" regarding 'CMakeLists.txt'
From: Belcourt, Kenneth (kbelco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-05-16 16:09:59

Hi Alain,

> On May 16, 2016, at 1:16 PM, alainm <alain.miniussi_at_oca.eu> wrote:
> 
> I dropped trying to contribute, I cannot waste days trying to understand how bjam tries to work *just for a single project*. Same thing goes for the doc BTW.

That’s too bad, we could use your help.  As far as why Intel MPI isn’t natively supported by Boost tools without explicit configuration, it’s complicated.

For starters, iMPI doesn’t seem to report the compiler return code back through their mpicxx wrapper script so, for example, if we pass an invalid option to the Intel Mpi wrapper, we get back a zero return code (which we assume means the option is supported by the wrapper / compiler).

-bash-4.1$ mpicxx -showme:compile
icpc: command line warning #10006: ignoring unknown option '-showme:compile'
/usr/lib/../lib64/crt1.o: In function `_start':
(.text+0x20): undefined reference to `main'
-bash-4.1$ echo $?
0

While if we pass this same option directly to the compiler, we get a failure rc.

-bash-4.1$ icpc -showme:compile
icpc: command line warning #10006: ignoring unknown option '-showme:compile'
icpc: command line error: no files specified; for help type "icpc -help"
-bash-4.1$ echo $?
1

This makes it nearly impossible for us to automatically detect the Intel MPI wrapper in bb if we can’t interrogate the wrapper to find out what’s supported.  If you have an Intel MPI contact, perhaps you could raise this issue with them or have them contact me and we’ll work this out together.

Noel