Building via Julia with BinaryBuilder

[MKAbdElrahman]

I really suffer each time I want to build meep from source. Is it possible to automate this with BinaryBuilder.jl. We can build for any target machine and the process is so easy.

[smartalecH]

Sure, care to take an initial stab at this?

Note that the conda builds are meant to solve this problem too (although we no longer have nightly builds, unfortunately).

[stevengj]

I use BinaryBuilder a lot for binary dependencies of Julia packages, but it is not really set up for Python dependencies, which pull in the whole Python ecosystem. (e.g. https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil doesn't have a binary package for numpy.)

Of course, we could build just the non-Python parts of Meep, but that wouldn't be useful to most people. Since the API is centered on Python, it makes more sense as a conda package.