Why can't cadiback use pre-installed cadical?

[yurivict]

The configure script looks for the src, build directories.
Why is this needed?

[arminbiere]

Because CaDiCaL has no standard way of being installed.

[yurivict]

Because CaDiCaL has no standard way of being installed.

We have it installed:

$ pkg info -l cadical
cadical-2.0.0:
        /usr/local/bin/cadical
        /usr/local/bin/mobical
        /usr/local/include/cadical.hpp
        /usr/local/include/ccadical.h
        /usr/local/lib/libcadical.a
        /usr/local/lib/libcadical.so
        /usr/local/lib/libcadical.so.2.0.0

[arminbiere]

I see! Will mark this as enhancement.

[yurivict]

You should provide a simple install target for all projects.

[arminbiere]

We discussed this in a different thread. These tools are not meant (at this point) to be used by the end-user and even then rarely in multiple projects. For those expert users, which usually also want to pin down the exact version of our solvers, a default global installation process is not helpfull.

[yurivict]

Still, 9 distros have ported cadical: https://repology.org/project/cadical/versions
All of them wrote their own installation procedures.
Users these days expect everything to be installed using a package manager. pkg install cadical.
Users would easily get confused if they would need to build things manually.

Here is the list of other ports that depend on cadical in the FreeBSD ports tree:

math/bitwuzla
math/boolector
math/cadiback
math/cvc5
math/lean4

All these ports would be impossible without cadical being properly installed first.

[arminbiere]

Strange, I thought they would package it.

[arminbiere]

The point is we are working with some of the developers of these tools to work on performance regressions of newer version of CaDiCaL. So they prefer older versions and not the latest, which means they need to pin down the version for their tool anyhow.

[SnarkBoojum]

I just tried to make a Debian package for cadiback -- and failed, because indeed it's not possible to base it on the existing cadical package: it would require access to cadical's sources.