How to swap between versions of the TELEMAC system

It is rather common to have more than one version of the TELEMAC system installed at the same time. Most developers will have at least the current stable and development versions installed at the same time. This article gives some hints on how to set up a system with concurrent versions alongside each other.

SYSTELCFG

The TELEMAC system allows several configuration directories. By default, it looks for /path/to/systel90/config/. However, if the environment variable SYSTELCFG it will use its value as the location of the configuration directory.

Switching between versions

Providing that the TELEMAC system is configured properly for each configuration directory (i.e. cfgmak has been run and all modules compiled with this setup), switching between versions is almost trivial:

To switch to version v5p7:

$ export SYSTELCFG=/path/to/systel90/configv5p7

To switch back to v5p8:

$ export SYSTELCFG=/path/to/systel90/configv5p7

To automate the process even more, it is possible to define bash function and load then in your .bashrc file. For instance you could add:

function v5p7 ()
# Use v5p7 configuration
{
	export SYSTELCFG=/path/to/systel90/configv5p7
}

function v5p8 ()
# Use v5p8 configuration
{
	export SYSTELCFG=/path/to/systel90/configv5p8
}

Then, you could simply switch between version by typing v5p7 or v5p8 at the command line:

$ v5p7
$ estel3d cas -> will use ESTEL-3D v5p7
$ v5p8
$ estel3d cas -> will use ESTEL-3D v5p8