Comments on building GrADS from source

[Jennifer Adams]

On Oct 27, 2005, at 12:16 PM, Tom Pollard wrote:

> 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,
yes.
> you've been doing a
> great job.
thanks!
> It's hard to maintain multiplatform builds.
agreed.
>
>
>> 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?
What I mean is that you can build a no-feature version of gradsc that
has no dependence on any library  -- everything for grib and binary I/O
is in the GrADS source code. But if you've got all those supplibs
built, then you're in fat city.

>> 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.
Ah, I haven't done that...

>> 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.
Isn't that why we pay Macintosh the big $$$? For backward
compatibility? And easy installation of fantastic software packages by
simply double clicking on a .dmg file?

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