Comments on building GrADS from source

[Tom Pollard]

Hi Jennifer,

On Oct 27, 2005, at 11:14 AM, Jennifer Adams wrote:
> I never thought an email thread about auto-configure systems would
> make
> me feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it has been a cruel and lonely
> business trying to compile and link GrADS and its required
> libraries on
> all the unix flavors and it comforts me to find out there are others
> out there fighting the same battles.

If you've been handling all that by yourself, you've been doing a
great job.  It's hard to maintain multiplatform builds.


> Re: GrADS configure system vs. "other" packages
> GrADS's dependence on supplibs cannot be avoided, unless you're
> willing
> to work in a fairly limited way with binary or grib data.

How could that be?  If I have builds of HDF4, gds, libdap, libnc-dap,
gadods, rx and udunits, shouldn't I be able to build a fully working
copy of GrADS?


> Re:  Building on a MacOSX 10.4 system, using gcc 4.0 and g95
> I struggled with this for a long time; it made me sorely regret
> upgrading to Tiger on my laptop.

I had some experiences like that, too.  It's been much better after
installing XCode 2.1.


> Had a breakthrough not too long ago.
> It should not be necessary for you to build everything from scratch.
> You should be able to build/link with the compiled supplibs that we
> distribute that were built in the pre-panther days (can't even
> remember
> what name that was...) Grab this tarfile:
>
> ftp://grads.iges.org/grads/Supplibs/1.9/grads-1.9b3-supplibs-
> darwin6.8.tar.gz
>
> With these supplibs, the only thing I needed to do was add:
>   # include <fcntl.h>
> to grads.h -- this somehow allowed the compiler to know what to do
> with
> the off_t declarations. I have no idea why -- just a little bit of
> magic that google provided. See if that helps.

Thanks!  I ran into that off_t error when I tried building against
the darwin supplibs.  I figured the supplibs had been built long
enough ago that there were likely to be incompatibilities between
those binaries and anything I was building with the current gcc-4.0,
and that it might be better to rebuild everything with the same
compilers.  But, I'll try again with this fix.

Cheers,

Tom