[Nexus-developers] Autoconf

[Ray Osborn]

Freddie,
Many thanks for getting the autoconf working.  I particularly appreciated
that you inserted some Mac OS X compilation switches for the Darwin
platform, which means that it worked out of the box, at least for HDF4.
However, I guess that begs the question:

Do we need to install all these switches into "configure.ac" for every
compiler/operating system combo, or is Darwin a special case?  For example,
it is now well-known that most ported unix programs need to be compiled with
-no-cpp-precomp on Darwin.  Now that Darwin is getting integrated into
autoconf, I wonder if autoconf might have a way of inserting it
automatically.  Otherwise, we will have to tweak "configure.ac" for every
operating system, and I thought that autoconf was meant to make that
unnecessary.

The other switches are all to do with the Fortran bindings.  Is there a way
of simplifying the napi.h now that we are using autoconf so that we don't
need so many ifdefs in the Fortran name mangling.  The -D__unix switch for
Darwin is only necessary so that napi.h treats Mac OS X as unix, so if
napi.h were to be simplified, another Darwin-specific flag might be
unnecessary.  

There is a problem with the makefiles in applications/ and test/ because
they don't find the Fortran 90 modules in bindings/f90.  For the Absoft
compiler, we need to add a -p../bindings/f90 flag, at least to those
makefiles.  Is that easy to do?  If I add it to "configure.ac", I presume
that it would attempt to use the flag in creating the F90 library itself,
and might get the wrong path.

Finally, I was only able to install the HDF4 version because the HDF5 build
failed with

napi5.c: In function `NX5open':
napi5.c:196: warning: passing arg 3 of `H5Pget_cache' from incompatible
pointer type
napi5.c:204: error: `H5F_CLOSE_STRONG' undeclared (first use in this
function)
napi5.c:204: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
napi5.c:204: error: for each function it appears in.)

Do any of the developers know why I get this error?

Thanks again, Freddie.  I think the NeXus distribution looks a lot more
professional already.

Regards,
Ray  
-- 
Dr Ray Osborn                Tel: +1 (630) 252-9011
Materials Science Division   Fax: +1 (630) 252-7777
Argonne National Laboratory  E-mail: ROsborn at anl.gov
Argonne, IL 60439-4845