modularization of OpenFOAM-Installation (selective build of libraries and solvers)
 

Hi,

most OpenFOAM users work in a distinct domain and use only a very limited set of solvers. During installation all libraries, tools and solvers are compiled though. The CPU time is not the problem since OpenFOAM usually runs on powerful machines with low compile times anyway. But the rather large file system footprint causes some trouble when maintaining large number of different installations and when creating Docker containers etc.

Is there a way to reduce the footprint by compiling and installing only the required set of tools? I'm thinking of something like CMake where you can often enable/disable the required features using ccmake or cmake-gui (assuming the CMakeLists.txt files are written properly for the project) ensuring the dependencies between the libs and executables are ok. These tools even allow to export the user settings and allows to transfer them to other machines and installations.

Obviously, I could tamper with the Allwmake scripts. This doesn't seem to be the right way since dependencies won't be checked (before the build process). Any better ideas?

Thanks
Cutter