[Nexus-developers] NeXus autotools

[Akeroyd, FA (Freddie)]

Mark, thanks for checking things out

> 
>   On Tru64, I get the following results:
> 
>   - Building the f90 binding does not work, the error message is:
>     * libtool tag: --tag=F77 not recognized.
>     This tag seems pretty inappropriate to me, anyway.
>

Sorry, that was an "evil" fix for Darwin - autotools doesn't know about f90
so I had to force it to treat the f90 link stage as if it was f77. It looks
like other systems may not need that fix (and don't seem to define an F77
tag anyway) - I didn't have f90 on linux to test at that point, but I think
we have it on a Digital unix box somewhere so I will investigate. 

>   - Building the java binding does not work either, it cannot find jni.h
>     What has to happen here, is that configure has to determine JAVA_HOME,
>     i.e. the installation directory of the java SDK. Then, a
>     -I$JAVA_HOME/include and -I$JAVA_HOME/include/machinetype is needed to
>     make this compile. Replace machinetype by alpha on an alpha, by linux
>     on a linux, by win32 on an evil system, may be to something else on
>     other systems.
> 
In the current configure script I located java using "which java" and then
made the assumption that java was installed as $JAVA_HOME/bin/java to
determine $JAVA_HOME; this happened to work on my Tru64 machine but probably
needs to be cleverer. We could instead just search for a list of possible
JAVA_HOME locations like we do for HDF


>   General remarks:
>   - Somebody has taken apart napi.c in three separate object files,
> napi.o,
>     napi4.o and napi5.o. This is a nice idea but the trouble is that it
> does
>     not work for me. I experience core dumps from NXdict or the Java
> binding
>     whenever an error is triggered. I played a bit with it, i.e. tried to
>     remove all the static keywords and make the error reporting functions
>     external but to no avail. This is some pretty subtle linking thing.
>     May be, it is only triggered when you overload the error reporting
>     functions. Lacking the time to do more work to this, I reverted to the
>     all in one file included version. Which happens to work.

Does it fail on all platforms?

Regards,

Freddie