Comments on building GrADS from source

[Jennifer Adams]

On Sep 15, 2005, at 5:09 PM, Richard A. Ryan wrote:
> Does the source from grads-1.9b4 currently use libwww or libcurl?

If you have an old version of gcc (2.95 or 2.96), then you can build
with DODS version 3.2, which uses libwww. That is what the current
GrADS configure script is looking for, and almost all the binary
releases we put out use this old version of the DODS supplib. If you
don't have the old version of gcc, then you can't build with DODS 3.2
and have to move to 3.4, which uses libcurl and libxml2. (Even the
OPeNDAP group is saddled with supplibs!) The old DODS way was to
package the supplibs with the libdap source (in the packages branch
of their src tree), but now they are moving away from that strategy
and forcing the users who are building from source to get the libxml2
and libcurl tarballs on their own (this is for OPeNDAP 3.5). Maybe
GrADS will take that path too, but it's too early to say for sure.
Anyway, building GrADS with DODS 3.4 requires a bit of hacking
because the DODS supplibs aren't the same -- you can edit the macros
and run bootstrap to get a new version of configure, or you can run
configure and then edit the makefile it generates. I have used both
techniques and can't really say which is better -- depends on whether
you understand Makefiles better than autoconf macros. In the ./bin
directory under your DODS installation, look for a program called
opendap-config. Run this with a "--libs" argument and you'll see what
you will need (more or less) to put in your GrADS Makefile.

Accessing station data via OPeNDAP requires libgadods, which is new
with GrADS 1.9. The configure script for libgadods also expects that
you're using DODS 3.2 and gcc2.9*, so if you want that capability,
you'll have to fiddle with that configure script/makefile too. DODS
3.4 has never been robustly tested in the context of a GrADS client
(especially for station data access), since we generally build with
DODS 3.2.

Any more nitty gritty you need to know?

Jennifer

--
Jennifer Miletta Adams
IGES/COLA
4041 Powder Mill Rd., Suite 302
Calverton, MD 20705
jma at cola.iges.org


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