[MITgcm-devel] sun os

[Ed Hill]

On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 02:51, Martin Losch wrote:
> My favorite operating system! Yesterday I tried to compile one 
> experiment (basically exp4) on one of our SunOS computers, but it 
> failed at the make-step (both with the default optfile and with 
> sunos_sun4u_f77 where MAKE=gmake is specified):
>  >> make
> compiled the c-code and then tried to link, of course it failed, 
> because no fortran source had been compiled.
> I then found out that gmake works. I remember that there was a 
> discussion about that, but what's the status? Is the inapt sun-user 
> (that's me) supposed to know that gmake has to be used instead of make? 
> On
> > http://mitgcm.org/pelican/online_documents/node90.html
> "make" is still the command to use.
> (It was quite embarrassing that after I have been claiming that the 
> MITgcm "compiles and runs everywhere without any problems", it didn't 
> compile and I didn't know why (took me some time to remember gmake)


Hi Martin,

What can we say?  For starters, theres no comprehensive standard for the
'make' syntax so no one can claim that their 'make' implementation is
100% standards compliant.  And the various ("old Unix vendor") 'make'
implementations are _infamous_ for having been somewhat incompatible
with each other.  Its the old "fracturing of Unix" story...

So the MITgcm Makefile has gained a lot of features over the past year
(including the ability to build without any tweaking on Mac OS X and
Windows with Cygwin).  This increased complexity means that some (not
all!) older 'make' implementations can't handle it.  And I'm sorry. 
We've chose Gnu Make as our de-facto standard because its available
basically everywhere and it supports the syntax we need.  And if you're
unlucky enough to be on a machine that doesn't have Gnu Make or a
sufficiently compatible make already installed, a local build is this
easy:

  $  wget ftp://aeneas.mit.edu/pub/gnu/make/make-3.80.tar.gz
  $  tar -xzf make-3.80.tar.gz
  $  cd make-3.80
  $  ./configure
  $  make

Also, theres a comment about 'make' versus 'gmake' at

  http://mitgcm.org/pelican/online_documents/node92.html

and we'll add more information to the docs during the upcoming DocFest
(in mid-October).

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Rm 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
             Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
emails:  eh3 at mit.edu                ed at eh3.com
URLs:    http://web.mit.edu/eh3/    http://eh3.com/
phone:   617-253-0098
fax:     617-253-4464