[Nexus-developers] NeXus Fortran bindings OSX,Linux

[Ron Ghosh]

Installation of NeXus libraries

To examine new ILL data in .nxs format I attempted using
the NeXus software donload from the web site onto Mac-OSX
version 10.5.8 (leopard, 2008), and fedora core 11 (x86_64, 2009)

Mac_osx
Using hdf5-1.8.5
The .dmg package installed without any indications of the location.
I subsequently found this in /usr/local/... There was no manifest.
There was no uninstall.  There were no fortran header file napif.inc
or NXmodule.f90.  I failed to build the examples; I did not have the
hdf4 library installed. I was using an HDF5 library which should
match the leopard system, which installed and checked through its
tests. There are two variants of hdf5, with fortran, without shareable
libraries, and without fortran, with shareable libraries.  I built
both; the latter is used with h5py, which I built successfully.

Since I had no idea of the configuration of the nexus build I decided to
copy the sources and build the library configuring without hdf4,
without xml, with fortran

I noted that the fortran bindings were not installed, and the fortran
test evidently failed.

Taking NXmodule.f90 from the /bindings directory the program compiled
manually but then crashed on running; gdb example in script.

I tried the napi_test.c  After editing napiconfig.h the program compiled
and ran.

I finally tried running napif5_test.f with the napif.inc header.  The
fortran entry points are not in the library libNexus.a

The build and running scripts are in build31may.rtf

Linux
I checked the rpm and found that the fortran headers were missing.  Again
there is no manifest, or indication of the configuration used. Installation
failed through missing dependencies.

Script in fed11inst



There are a few conflicts between the installation instructions on the WIKI
and
the main site; it is not clear which is the more relevant; those on the
WIKI seem
better.  For the distributions the documentation in the READme and INSTALL
and RELEASE notes constitute rather a mixed bag.

The distributed fortran headers NXmodule.f90 (3.9) doesn't match the current
version 4.2.


I am thus a little disappointed in that none of the fortran examples seem
to work,
and there is a lack of information on installing and checking.  It is
really hard work to find the necessary matching components.  For HDF4 the
website note on potential problems on mac-intel is broken.

Distributing a run-time set of libraries could be considered; this is
a necessary option for OSX since they are easily located with the
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

For programs that only read data use of the hdf5 libraries only is a
possibility.  This would reduce the problem of installation to a single
package.

I have not tried the Windows versions.


I would be grateful for comments on these apparent system sensitivities;
this summary note is the consequence of more than 10 builds and tests.


Ron Ghosh

-- 
Ron Ghosh
62 Hookfield
Epsom KT19 8JG
UK
(+44)1372728294
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