On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Norman Gray wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Norman Gray wrote:
>
> > Working through the dense trees of dependencies here, I'm increasingly
> > aware of how convoluted all this is. It strikes me that we could do
>
> I'd like to propose dropping the various star_dev commands (and similar
> things within makefiles) which create local-directory links for Fortran
> include files, since it's easy to add a -I$STARLINK/include to the default
> Fortran compile flags at configure time. g77, Sun f77 and Alpha f77 all
> support this flag, and I can't imagine there are any important compilers
> which don't. Doing this would remove yet another peculiarity of the
> Starlink build process, at no cost I can think of.
>
> Similarly, since the files par_par (for example) are always invoked as
> PAR_PAR, is there any reason why they're not installed as such?
This follows from FORTRAN itself being a case-insensive language and VMS
having a case-insensitive file system, so include files back then were
'PAR_PAR' not 'par_par' (well almost, the include files were located using
symbols, a bit like aliases, that you created using package commands like
star_dev etc.).
Initially when we first moved to UNIX Dave Terrett produced SPT (see
SUN/111) which editted include file statements to the full file names, but
we found the necessity to do this a burden, so the current system was
adopted, which does not rely on any special features of the compiler, just
the operating system having something like a copy/link command.
> Are there any other oddnesses which have been gnawing away at folk?
> This is the time to sort them out.
Just one further point. If you go ahead and consolidate all the
development tweaks, remember that we do have a lot of people who use these
now and successfully develop software, even under this incredible burdon,
it's a pain to them if you change things (for change sake).
Peter.
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