Re: [Ifeffit] Help installing Demeter on a Mac

Hi Joseph, Kyle, Sorry for the trouble Kyle, and thanks, Joseph. I will say that I have had many times and without a lot of success to get Demeter to work reliably on MacOS. I cannot blame any one tool or library for this: MacPorts usually works pretty well. But there are sort of a lot of packages involved here. When trying to install Demeter, I often find MacPorts deciding that it needs to build lots of packages from source, which is not only slow but also more prone to problems that maybe someone familiar with a certain software tool would know how to fix, but that just isn't practical here. Wx widgets for Perl seem particularly problematic for this. The last release of wxperl I see is from 2017 and I get the feeling that its use on MacOS was never that big. I am not certain that Mac-Demeter is doomed to break permanently, but I agree with Joseph that this could happen anytime now. But, you are not the only one who would like this to work. George Sterbinsky at APS recently sent me his instructions for getting Demeter to work on his Mac. This is at: https://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/ifeffit/DemeterOnMac/. I am not sure if these instructions would be helpful to the Demeter port file. And, of course, you are certainly encouraged to give Larch and XAS Viewer a try. Though Larch really started as a replacement for ifeffit with the expectation that Demeter could replace the ifeffit engine with Larch, one of the main motivations for developing XAS Viewer was as an Athena/Artemis replacement, especially as the development efforts for Demeter slowed. And running XAS Viewer is well-supported. --Matt On Fri, Jun 30, 2023 at 12:53 PM Fowler, Joseph W. (Assoc) < joe.fowler@nist.gov> wrote:

Hello Kyle,

I agree that putting /opt/local/bin in your PATH should be adequate, so this isn’t totally obvious. The executables athena, hephaestus, and artemis should all be in /opt/local/bin/. Are they?

What is the result if you execute the following?

$ port contents demeter

I’m the official maintainer of the Macports version of Demeter. Unfortunately, I’m not a regular user. In fact, it’s not installed on the everyday computer that I’ve had for four years (to give you an idea of what “not regular” means to me).

Worse, there’s a chronic problem that I have never worked out how to solve. The Demeter ports depends on many things. One is ifeffit, which is not really still supported, but Demeter can’t just magically start using Matt Newville’s replacement for ifeffit, known as Larch. It feels to me like Mac-Demeter is doomed to break permanently pretty soon, if it has not already.

[Bruce, Matt, have I stated that accurately? Please correct me if I’m wrong.]

Still, there exists a port for ifeffit and for demeter, and one should be able to install them. I’m trying it right now on a Mac that lacks them. It will take me a while, because I’m not a Perl user either, and there are dozens of dependencies to install first. Let’s see how it goes for me…

This install is taking a very long time. I’m going to send this note as-is and report later about whether I can make athena run, and where the executable is located. (But I’m sure it will be /opt/local/bin/ )

Could I suggest that, if you get it to work, and you use it regularly, and you’re an open-source supporter, would you think about helping as a second official maintainer of the Demeter port? Other users could benefit from me teaming up with an actual demeter user, to be sure!

Best wishes, Joe Fowler NIST Boulder Labs

On Jun 30, 2023, at 11:00 AM, ifeffit-request@millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov wrote:

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1. Help installing Demeter on a Mac (Kluherz, Tk)

*From: *"Kluherz, Tk" *Subject: **[Ifeffit] Help installing Demeter on a Mac* *Date: *June 30, 2023 at 10:02:03 AM MDT *To: *"ifeffit@millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov" < ifeffit@millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov>

Hello All, I’m a new postdoc at NREL, trying to install Demeter on my NREL Mac. I have previously only installed it on a Linux system. I followed the instructions https://bruceravel.github.io/demeter/documents/SinglePage/macinstallation.ht... for installing on a Mac, including the logout/login, and the installation appeared to be successful, with no errors. However, when I then try to run athena/artemis/hephaestus from the command line, I get a ‘command not found’ error. Has anyone encountered this problem before? I thought I found a thread in the archives from 2014, but there was not response to the issue. I suspect it may be that the command location was not added to the $PATH, but am not sure where it is in order to add it. Here’s the output from echo $PATH:

/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/TeX/texbin Any help would be appreciated! Thanks, Kyle

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