[gmx-developers] Packaging GROMACS in Bioconda

[Robin Long]

Hello All,

I am an RSE at Manchester working with Stian Soiland-Reyes, I have 
previously been tasked with updating the bioconda gromacs recipe. In the 
process of improving this so that Gromacs in conda has support for MPI 
some of the build option has been questioned and we are unsure why these 
decisions were made in the first place and what side affects would come 
about from removing them.

Specifically, why are we using static libraries in the build instead of 
shared ones, and why we are building static libraries to be linked 
against. It maybe that these could be removed, but if anyone has any 
knowledge as to why these were setup this way, or what affect removing 
them would have we would be grateful.

The questions and build scripts can be seen here: 
https://github.com/bioconda/bioconda-recipes/pull/25847/#discussion_r545226970

Thanks,

Robin Long

Research Software Engineer,

University of Manchester