Co-Developing with Axom and MFEM

Occasionally, Serac developers may want to patch fixes and useful features back to MFEM and Axom. A co-development build environment is available to expedite this process via git submodules.

To enable a co-develop workflow, use the following steps from the root serac directory:

1. Initialize submodules. Axom and MFEM are submodules of the Serac repository. The following command recursively updates all submodules:

   $ git submodule update --init --recursive
   

2. Generate Build System via CMake. Configure our CMake build with the co-develop option using a local host-config (CMake initial cache) generated by Spack. You can do this one of two ways:

   # Option 1: This uses CMake to configure Axom, MFEM, and Serac in one step.
   $ ./config-build.py -hc <host config file> -DSERAC_ENABLE_CODEVELOP=ON
   $ cd <build directory> # this is autogenerated by script based on host-config name
   
   # Option 2:
   $ mkdir <build directory>
   $ cd <build directory>
   $ cmake -C <host config file> -DSERAC_ENABLE_CODEVELOP=ON ..
   

3. Build/Test code. Build MFEM, Axom, and Serac:

   $ make -j
   $ make -j test