sla Re: Packaging Starlink CNF (highly portable fortran<->C bridge)
> On 2/9/06, Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > For my work I developed quite some useful code (in meteorological
> > environments) and it's licensed GPL. It now works, and it's time to
> > think about distribution. All the dependencies are fine except CNF:
> >
> > http://www.starlink.ac.uk/static_www/soft_further_CNF.html
> >
> > CNF is a highly portable bridge between C and Fortran. It completely
> > hides arch and compiler issues behind a convenient set of macros, and
> > provides functions to common conversion tasks (like converting strings
> > between Fortran and C). So far I found it superior to any other
> > C/Fortran bridging layer, especially for portability.
> >
> > Now, CNF is licensed under the terms of GPL, but the installer's fairly
> > weird (http://www.starlink.ac.uk/store/store.html):
> > - Get the package from http://www.starlink.ac.uk/cgi-store/ftpform1?CNF
> > - Unpack the shell archive
> > - Go through an interactive process to configure and build and install
> >
> > The interactive process is also the process that generates the CNF
> > macros according to the architecture and compiler in use.
> >
> > Is anyone interested in packaging this wild beast and would like to work
> > on it together with me?
On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 05:59:22PM -0800, Nick Barkas wrote:
> I have built starlink software before, specifically sla, and found
> that a good place to get relatively "normal" tarballs from which you
> can build individual components without needing their entire build
> system are available here:
> http://dev.starlink.ac.uk/build/DEBIAN-3.0r3_i386/dist/. I have only
> used the sla code from that directory, but there is also a tarball for
> cnf in there, I see.
>
> I considered working on packaging starlink software, at least sla,
> when installing sla at my job, but put it far on the back burner since
> we, unfortunately, mostly do not use debian-based distributions where
> I work. But if someone besides me is interested in seeing part or all
> of the starlink code debian-ized, I would be happy to assist!
Note also that SLA, at least, is supposedly not actively maintained in
in its fortran version, but the (proprietary) C one only. My saods9
package had this "obfuscated-GPL-C" version, and I was able to pull
the fortran CVS implementation instead, pretty much only because
everything was already in place, and all I needed to do was
g77 -c *.f; ar ../libfoo.a *.o
and uncomment the fortran wrapper file from a Makefile elsewhere.
Justin
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