Non-executables are installed in bin

[dpo]

On OSX, make install installs non-executables in $PREFIX/bin, e.g., the compiled MEX files, and some dlls. Is there a way to tell cmake to install those elsewhere?

[vitaut]

dlls should normally be installed in bin, because these are AMPL function libraries that must reside on the PATH for AMPL to find them. I am not familiar with the usual conventions for mex files, are these supposed to be installed in lib?

[tkelman]

mex files should probably go wherever shared libraries go, since that's all they are. So bin on Windows, lib on Unix would make sense to me.

[dpo]

Homebrew won't tolerate non-executables in bin or non-libraires in lib. I don't think it will consider dlls as libraries since those normally don't exist on OSX (in fact I don't understand why I'm getting dlls at all). The ideal would be to be able to specify where stuff should go, as configure lets you do, by specifying bindir, libdir, etc. Then in Homebrew, I'll be able to symlink things properly.

[tkelman]

There are cmake variables for most of this stuff. AMPL hardcodes some file names expecting these to be named dll and located in bin on all platforms (it's dlopening them, not linking to them), AIUI.

If you don't expect anyone to use the homebrew ASL version with a full install of AMPL, you can probably delete them.

[vitaut]

.dll is used for historical reasons and to keep scripts that use them identical on all platforms, these are ordinary .so files on Linux or .dylib files on OS X. There might be bindir and libdir equivalents in CMake, but I'm not aware of them.

I've changed the install directory for .mex files to follow the conventions used for shared libraries as suggested by @tkelman in f1e9cc3.

[vitaut]

@dpo, I can add a CMake option to install AMPL function libraries in some other directory in case it helps. But then these libraries will have to be symlinked somewhere on the PATH for AMPL to be able to find these libraries.

[vitaut]

@tkelman AMPL function libraries can be used by solvers even if AMPL itself is not installed.

[tkelman]

Right, I do that with ASL reasonably often, but I don't think ASL is one of these always-.dll files we're talking about. Are the scripts that make the naming assumptions or code that's doing the dlopening in ASL, or some other component here or in the proprietary parts of AMPL?

[dpo]

Thanks @vitaut. If I install everything in libexec, then I can symlink what I need to keep homebrew happy.

[dpo]

See https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-science/pull/1796.

[vitaut]

I've added AMPL_LIBRARY_DIR CMake variable that allows you to specify the directory to install AMPL function libraries relative to ${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}:

$ cmake -DAMPL_LIBRARY_DIR=libexec ...

@dpo, thanks a lot for your work on this!

@tkelman, no, ASL is not one of the .dll libraries. The code to read them is in ASL because solvers may rely on it. Unfortunately these naming assumptions are all over the place, in scripts, in ASL and, perhaps in AMPL, so we'll have to live with them (BTW I dislike this naming convention myself).

Closing for now. Feel free to reopen or open another issue if there are any other problems with this.

[dpo]

Thanks @vitaut. By the way, I just noticed that jacpdim.h isn't installed in include/asl (or anywhere else). Is that intentional?

[vitaut]

No, it's not intentional. Should be fixed in e983438, thanks for catching this.