On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Norman Gray wrote:

>
> Quite separately, I've drafted a paper for Software Practice and Experience 
> on the build system.  It's a late-ish draft, but I've decided to leave it for 
> a few days before returning for a proper read through.  It's currently at 
> <http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/temp/star-cvs-1.6.pdf>: I'm not 
> looking for anything detailed, but if anyone would like to glance through it 
> and make observations of the `too long', `too boring', `I want more detail' 
> class, I'd be most appreciative.

Looks excellent on a first pass.

* Is this the intended author list?

* The OSX Tiger problems are I believe down to the -nostdlib in 
conjunction with g95 (and the original lack of -single_module).

* Mention of preprocessing probably should mention that lacking native fpp 
support in conjunction with a case insensitive file system causes problems 
since we use a .F extension.

* We don't actually use ESO catlib so it should really be removed from 
thirdparty. We should probably add ncurses to thirdparty with an existence 
check (as I found when building 64bit on Mac)

* I have encountered problems in SURF with fortran preprocessing since I 
was using a variable named PACKAGE. I had to undefine the FPP PACKAGE 
symbol for it to build properly.

* The restFP situation is much better on Tiger with g95 *but* the fact 
that the g95 runtime library contains MAIN_ causes problems when linking 
C programs with fortran libraries (hence all the dummy MAIN_ and fortran 
runtime initialisation shenanigans).

* We have had problems with non-ANSI C (NBS and IDI) with their lack of 
void* and prototypes.

* 'phillipics'? Not on dictionary.com

* 'acuquianting'

* Did you want to mention the "tiger team"? I think that week was 
essential in giving the work a boost. It really broke the back of the port 
and was

-- 
Tim Jenness
JAC software
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj