[JOSS REVIEW] Document Dependencies Versions

[schuhmaj]

The issue

JOSS requires

Installation instructions: Is there a clearly-stated list of dependencies? Ideally these should be handled with an automated package management solution.

This issue is a necessity.

I've now tested your software on three different systems to verify the outlined installation procedure and GPU features:

• Ubuntu 24.04, Intel Core i9900K with RTX 2080, GCC 13
• Ubuntu 20.04, Intel Core i7-10700, GCC 10
• macOS 15.1.1, M1 Pro, Apple Clang 16

On the second system, I got the following compile error

EXP/expui/FieldBasis.cc: In member function ‘virtual std::vector<double> BasisClasses::FieldBasis::sph_eval(double, double, double)’:
EXP/expui/FieldBasis.cc:472:23: error: no matching function for call to ‘begin(Eigen::Matrix<std::complex<double>, -1, 1>&)’
  472 |  for (auto v : store[0]) fout << v << std::endl;

It is related to the utilized eigen version. If I compile with eigen 3.4 everything works flawlessly (e.g. installed via conda or apt). However, Ubuntu 20.04 provides by default version 3.3.7 via apt.

Looking at the documentation, the concrete required version (or equivalent version to be known to work) aren't specified anywhere. This is necessarily to be changed for eigen, but also the other dependencies which need to be set up by the user and are not automatically set up via the Build System.

Two options:

• Either state the versions in the documentation/ INSTALL.md
• Or, make the build system more automatic as suggested in [JOSS REVIEW] Improve Install Instructions/ Process #94

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This issue is part of the JOSS review: openjournals/joss-reviews#7302

[michael-petersen]

The eigen<3.4 issue just bit me in a different fresh compile as well -- one strategy around this is to submodule Eigen (and potentially also hdf5), so that we can control the version explicitly. The downside is that some extra code is added, and we'll (possibly) have to manually manage the versions.

[michael-petersen]

We've sorted this by requiring Eigen 3.4 and above -- see EXP-code/EXP-docs#32.

[michael-petersen]

Finished with the merge of #100.