Portability issues

As of this writing, SKIRT administration has been performed on macOS with Qt Creator as a development environment. It is recommended to use the same setup unless there are good reasons to do otherwise.

If necessary, using another Unix-based operating system is probably feasible with limited work. Similarly, building SKIRT through the command line interface (shell scripts) instead of Qt Creator should work fine. However, building the MakeUp utility requires the Qt libraries anyway, so one can then simply install Qt Creator as well.

Here is a list of known portability issues; most likely there will be others:

The shell scripts used for interacting with the Ghent University servers contain macOS specific commands.
Some of the PTS command line operations related to administration automatically locate the relevant components in the SKIRT directory hierarchy relative to the user's home directory. This may fail on other systems.
For a significant fraction of the functional tests, the precise results depend on the C/C++ run-time environment, which differs between operating systems and compilers. As a result, annoyingly, the reference files provided for the functional tests are not portable. The reason for these discrepancies is that the C/C++ standard allows the output of goniometric functions (and perhaps other mathematical functions) to differ in the least-significant bit. This tiny difference suffices for the SKIRT photon packets to follow a slightly different path, and thus produce different results.

Software tools

As an administrator you need essentially all software tools mentioned in the SKIRT Installation Guide. Assuming macOS and Qt Creator, this means you need to install the tools listed in the following table.

Note: To clone the SKIRT and/or PTS respositories, do not follow the instructions in the regular installation guide. Instead, follow the procedure prescribed in the topic SKIRT project directory structure.

Tool	Instructions	Comments
C/C++ compiler	Build tools
CMake	Build tools
git	Build tools
''	Configure git
GitHub desktop	https://desktop.github.com/download/	Optional but very handy as a compliment to git
Qt/Qt Creator	Development environment
''	Configure Qt Creator
clang-format	Source code formatter
doxstyle	Header documentation formatter	Possible only AFTER installing SKIRT
Doxygen, Graphviz	Documentation generator
LaTeX distribution	https://www.latex-project.org/get/	Optional but important to check formulas
MPI	MacOS	Optional but required for multi-processing
DS9	FITS viewer
python	Python distribution