version equivalence

[michaelaye]

hi! After some years of hiatus i'm getting back into openfoam and found your interesting work in supporting a lot of Mac stuff with working with OpenFOAM.
As I found, you can not directly take a released version like v13 from the foundation due to incompatibility with the ARM OS you need to compile from scratch for our ARM Macs.
2 questions related to this:

1. Why don't you use the name version IDs as the foundation? is that not allowed for legal reason, or because you need to apply some changes to make it work, so that it's not technically correct to keep the same version ID?
2. How would I know from your versioning scheme if it's based on the most recent release of OF (like v13) or, IOW, on which version is any given version from you based on? Obviously the user needs to know which features are supported?

Thanks for your work!

[michaelaye]

i think i answered myself: I didn't see that the .com version uses other version numbers, and those seem to match your version numbers, so it seems that you exclusively distribute the .com version but NOT the foundation version because that one simply does not compile on ARM yet?

[gerlero]

@michaelaye Yes, exactly. I’ll add a little bit of context later, but that pretty much it.

[gerlero]

Just note that the “problem” with .org is not Arm support (they support Arm-based Linux) but macOS support (they don’t seem to support either Intel or Arm)

[gerlero]

The .com distribution instead supports macOS on both Intel and Arm. They just don’t distribute compiled builds for macOS, so I do it here.

[gerlero]

@michaelaye As you said in your reply, this project is built using the source code from OpenCFD's distribution (openfoam.com), and that's why the available versions follow their versioning scheme.

For the case of the Foundation's distribution (openfoam.org), the main hurdle to building their distribution for macOS is that they explicitly don't support compiling on macOS (see #14 (comment)). I'm sure the source code can be carefully patched until it works, but someone would have to do that work; if someone were to manage to do it in a somewhat clean, maintainable way (ideally also contributing the patches to openfoam.org), then I would certainly consider offering Foundation versions here too.