Comments on building GrADS from source

[walter harms]

suse ships header separatly from libs look for gd-devel




Jennifer Adams wrote:
> On Oct 25, 2005, at 8:42 PM, Len Makin wrote:
>
>> Hi Jennifer,
>> As a non-GrADS user (a mere support person ;-) I was charged with
>> (re)building GrADS after we had a disk crash, and subsequently changed
>> to
>> SuSe Linux which doesn't include it in the distribution. I decided the
>> safest was to build from source, so downloaded 1.9b4(tar.gz). I was
>> surprised to find it had a simple problem discovered as follows:
>>
>> [Note: many application packages for our users are installed under
>> /tools ]
>> Checking for desirable pre-requisites and what was currently
>> installed, I
>> installed (/usr/local):
>>       - gd-2.0.33 (Note:With SuSe, libgd.so is installed in
>> /usr/lib,rpm -q
>> tells me version is gd-2.0.32-6, but there are no corresponding
>> headers (gd.h) and related files. Need something like
>> gd-devel?? - not in SuSe)
> Try installing this version of the gd library instead:
> ftp://grads.iges.org/grads/Supplibs/1.8/src/gd-1.7.3.tar.Z
>
> I don't know what SuSe and Fedora have in common, but you might want to
> try Pat Dumas's version of the auto-configure system (recently posted
> to gradsusr) and see how it works with version 1.7.3 of the gd library.
>
>> <snip> ... people are submitting needed
>> changes. What is the process for testing and incorporating these into
>> the
>> official sources. How often are source updates expected to be released?
>> Presumably the b in b4 means beta status, so is there an expected 1.9
>> (non-beta) version?
> GrADS development is not continuous. It happens in spits and bursts,
> followed by periods of nothing. We do plan to put out a non-beta
> version of 1.9 -- there are still a few bugs that need to be fixed and
> I am working on them as time allows. The supplibs are another big
> problem -- your issues with the gd library are a perfect example. And
> the DODS/OPeNDAP libraries are also problematic, since we can't really
> continue to use  version 3.2 because it requires a outdated version of
> gcc, but I haven't been able to find the time to build and test with
> version 3.5 -- this is something I REALLY need to do. Pat Dumas's
> patches for the build system are likely going to make it a lot more
> robust, but I have not been able to implement or test them either.
>
> I could say a lot more, but will restrain myself and leave it at this:
> right now our resources are too limited to provide the complete support
> the community really needs.
>
> Jennifer
> --
> Jennifer Miletta Adams
> Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA)
> 4041 Powder Mill Road, Suite 302
> Calverton, MD 20705 USA
> jma at cola.iges.org
>
>
>