Debian Salomé Package

Salomé is an amazing CAD program, mesher frontend, and general simulation pre- and post-processor. It is made up of several modules loaded by default at runtime called: KERNEL, GUI, GEOM, MED, VISU, SMESH, YACS and NETGENPLUGIN. Others which could be useful are RANDOMIZER, COMPONENT and SIERPINSKY. The HELLO, PYHELLO, CALCULATOR and PYCALCULATOR modules are provided as examples of module development. And the HXX2SALOME and XDATA modules provide tools for module development.

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 okay. But the following need to get done at some point:

• Make man pages for the salome scripts in /usr/bin.
• Bring tests out of the main salome package and put them into their own salome-tests package.
• Make a doc-base file pointing to the Salomé index (is there even a complete Salomé index?), and a link from that index to this README.Debian.html file.
• Split salome-dev-doc out of enormous salome-doc package.
• 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 python2.5 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!