[MITgcm-devel] sun os

[Alistair Adcroft]

Ed,

We won our portability by working on it. Tweaking, as you call it, is 
part of the job. It is a cop out to insist that users should install 
gmake when it not a given that they can. We had this discussion before 
and I fixed the issue then by changing one line in genmake2. It is not a 
good sign that we tell people how to install gmake before looking at the 
  problem. I appreciate the issues with make versions but this didn't 
stop us before; all that's changed is a willingness to make it work.

A.

Ed Hill wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 08:27, Alistair Adcroft wrote:
> 
>>Martin,
>>
>>The error msg would help.
>>
>>We did discuss this and it was a minor mistake to fix last time (SUFFIX 
>>order) to recover general make compatibility. We *do* have a policy of 
>>using the lowest common denominator make and are not adopting gmake as a 
>>standard but the implementation just isn't in line with our policy.  :-)
> 
> 
> Hi Alistair,
> 
> Whether its your "policy" or not, I've seen Makefile/shell failures on
> old Alpha machines as recently as last week and its not just one little
> SUFFIX ordering problem.  On some systems, there are problems with the
> shell scripts invoked by make and on others its the make syntax itself.
> 
> And its a *losing* strategy to keep tweaking the Makefile and the
> associated shell scripts to get the combination to work on one ancient
> machine only to have it break on some other obscure bit of hardware. 
> And all the while we keep adding more genmake and Makefile features. 
> Yes, we should (and do!) aim for maximum portability but its just silly
> to claim that we aim to support every make and shell out there.
> 
> On the other hand, its very easy for both us and our users to point them
> towards KNOWN GOOD make and shell implementations that are essentially
> 100% portable.  In the _rare_ cases where their system-default make
> and/or shell fails, then we have a solution!
> 
> Ed
> 


-- 
Dr Alistair Adcroft            http://www.mit.edu/~adcroft
MIT Climate Modeling Initiative        tel: (617) 253-5938
EAPS 54-1624,  77 Massachusetts Ave,  Cambridge,  MA,  USA