I’ve been compiling and testing the Open Porous Media (OPM) reservoir simulators for over a week now, and have discovered one very annoying ‘feature’ of the Ubuntu package tool.

I have had great success compiling OPM under Ubuntu 14.04, which is the ‘official’ version for OPM at this time.

I have had less than great success compiling OPM under Ubuntu 16.04 for the past week. Once I did a lot of manual tweaking and got it to compile, but every time since I’ve had the build fail. It isn’t easy to diagnose as the log files run to thousand of lines.

Tonight I figured out the problem.,, and it’s made me a bit cranky.

The issue is that there are package differences between Ubuntu 14 and 16, but I already knew that. It’s what the package manager does with some differences that’s annoying.

The command to install a package in Ubuntu is ‘apt-get install’, followed by one or more packages. So far, so good. But here’s the problem… if you specify multiple packages in the list, and any one of them no longer exists, the ENTIRE INSTALL fails. Worse, there’s no real error message. You only figure it out by the lack of messages about the packages that didn’t get installed.

For example, say you run ‘sudo apt-get install packa packb packd1.02 packe

If packd1.02 existed in U14 but now it’s packd1.11 (for example), you do get a message in the log telling you that packd1.02 cannot be found and thus cannot be installed. What you don’t get is any message telling you that it’s aborted the entire install and so packa, packb and packe are also NOT installed.

It took a few days to track down (why was BOOST missing all the time???) but finally I cracked the code, and it looks like the big compile is proceeding as expected.