Debian Salomé Package

Salomé is an amazing CAD program, mesher frontend, and general simulation pre- and post-processor. Debian packaging is organized as follows:

• The main salome binary package includes several modules loaded by default at runtime called: KERNEL, GUI, GEOM, MED, VISU, SMESH and YACS.
• salome-extras includes RANDOMIZER, COMPONENT and SIERPINSKY, and will include NETGENPLUGIN when it links to Debian's Netgen library package.
• salome-examples includes the LIGHT and PYLIGHT light-weight graphical interfaces for Salomé, and HELLO, PYHELLO, CALCULATOR and PYCALCULATOR modules as examples of module development.
• The HXX2SALOME and XDATA modules in the salome-dev package provide tools for module development; that package also provides headers and shared library symlinks.
• And the salome-test package includes numerous test programs and data.

Salomé components communicate using CORBA, and specifically, the omniORB object request broker (ORB). This allows the different components to run in different processes, and on different machines across a network when necessary.

To run Salomé, use the menu, or type runSalome --gui at the prompt. There are a lot of command line options, such as specifying which modules to load, and --killall kills processes left over from the previous run before starting a new one. The command killSalome kills all Salomé and related omniORB processes.

The package runs well, but could use a few updates at some point:

• Make man pages for the salome scripts in /usr/bin.
• Build a test suite script which runs all of the tests in the salome-test package.
• Link to the Aster and Saturne mechanics/heat and fluid flow solvers
• Make a salome-dev-doc binary out of the (voluminous) generated documentation.
• The .m4 files' check names like CHECK_KERNEL are a bit presumptuous. They should change to CHECK_SALOME_KERNEL etc.
• Many of the libs need to link to additional libraries to get all of their symbols, and many of them link to libraries they don't need (see dh_shlibdeps warnings).
• Right now, the package only builds a python2.6 version. However, rebuilding just the python parts of each module for each python version will be very tricky, and rebuilding the entire thing for each python version is probably unworkable -- the package takes long enough to build as it is!