5.4  Details, custom compilation

Read this section if you have problems or want to know more. It is not necessary most of the time.

Most of the development of Gnucap was done on a PC running Linux. I have also compiled it successfully on several other systems, listed at the end of this file. Other users have ported it to several other systems. Some of the files are included in the distribution. They may not have been tested in the latest release. It should compile with any “standard” C++ compiler. It should produce no warnings when compiled with the switches in the supplied makefiles and g++, except those due to the system supplied header files being defective. It requires templates, but not exceptions.

All source files are in the src and modelgen directories. I use subdirectories for the .o files each supported machine. This makes it possible to install it on several different machines all sharing the same file system.

To avoid maintaining multiple versions of Makefiles, I have broken them up to parts that must be concatenated: Make1.*, Make2.*, Make3.*. In general, to make a Makefile for your system, cat one of each. See the Makefile for details. I have automated this for some systems. Just “make your-machine”, if it is one that is supported. In some cases, the Makefile will compile both a “release” and “debug” version. In these cases, type “make your-machine-release” or “make your-machine-debug” depending on which you want. This will make the appropriate Makefile, cd to where the .o's go and run make from there. For porting information for specific machines, read its Make2.* file.

I assume that make will follow “VPATH” to find the sources. This system makes it possible to manage several platforms on a single file system which may be NFS mounted to all the supported machines. If your make does not support VPATH, there are three options. The preferred method on unix based systems is to cd to where the .o's go and type ln -s ../*.cc ../*.h .. (The command ends with a dot.) This will set up links so the Makefiles will work as intended. In some cases we have set up the Makefile to do this automatically. The second method, which may be needed on systems that don't have symbolic links is to copy the .c and .h files to satisfy make. The third option, where you have only one computer, is to move the machine specific Makefile to the src directory and run make from there.

If you have g++ on a unix type system that is not directly supported, try to compile it by just typing make. In most cases this will do it, but you may get a few warnings. If it doesn't work, look in the file md.h for hints. Just plain make will build a guess at a release version, assuming a Linux-like system with GNU tools.

If you want a development version with additional debugging enabled, type make debug. This results in a significant speed penalty.

Then make the installation version, select the machine you have from the make file and make that. The machine specific versions will build in their own directory, have debugging code disabled, and options are set for best speed. The general purpose make g++ builds a version that is optimized as much as it can be in the general case.

If you have a cfront-type compiler, called CC, and your system is not directly supported, try it first by typing make CC. Again, you may get a few warnings but it should work. Look in the file md.h for hints, if it doesn't work, or if the warnings look serious.

Since C++ is an evolving language, there are some known portability problems. All of them are due to compilers that do not implement the standard correctly. Since the problems will go away in time, I have chosen not to burden the code with them, except where a few mainstream systems fail. All dependencies should be confined to the two files md.h and md.cc, if possible.

There should be NO non-portable code anywhere but the md_* files. If a fix is absolutely necessary elsewhere, #define some symbol in md.h and refer to it elsewhere. Then consider it to be temporary.