"symlinks" command? Checkout script broken

[rfriese]

Hi,

this concerns:
https://github.com/KappaAnalysis/KappaTools/blob/master/Toolbox/scripts/ini_KappaTools.sh#L35
I tried a fresh checkout. When our ini_Higgs... script calls the ini_KappaTools.sh I get the error:

Setting up kappa version 1.0: Updating symlinks under external/slc6_amd64_gcc481 /afs/desy.de/user/r/rfriese/xxl/analysis71/CMSSW_7_1_5/src/Artus/../KappaTools/Toolbox/scripts/ini_KappaTools.sh: line 35: symlinks: command not found

I never did anything in KappaTools and what this line is supposed to do, if it's linked to anything our checkout script or anything else. The error doesn't seem severe, I can still compile and run Artus.

[rcaspart]

Hi, to my knowledge symlinks is not installed on slc6 per default (whereas it is on slc5). As this is also far from being a standard tool (and also not the most common usecase), I think we can also hardly ask the naf admins to install it on all portals.
Imitating the behaviour of symlinks with standard tools is also quite hard, so I would suggest to instead change this to explicitly check for symlinks first (command -v symlinks >/dev/null 2>&1 && symlinks -c ${CMSSW_BASE}/external/${SCRAM_ARCH}/lib/). This should be fine as I don't recall having had any problems due to symlinks before this change.

[thomas-mueller]

Maybe I should use this issue to ask for help on this topic. The reason why I introduced this command was the fact, that the Kappa libraries are not correctly copied to a remote (grid) batch system (which I think is relevant for the Aachen Tier2 and the Freiburg cluster). Therefore I changed to the setup mechanism for external modules in CMSSW, that Georg Sieber explained to me. Unfortunately, CMSSW creates symlinks in $CMSSW_BASE/external/$SCRAM_ARCH/lib to absolute paths. These symlinks get correupted, when you copy the environment somewhere else. The first attempt to solve this was to turn these symlinks into links to relative paths. I see, that this solution is not very optimal and I would be happy if somebody could propose a better way. I can also implement and try this out then.

[thomas-mueller]

I made a temporary fix (0065c48) and asked via Hypernews for advice.