Re: [ccp4bb]: Re: [ccp4-dev]: building under Irix 6.5

[Harry Powell <harry@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk>]

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Hi

> I'm pretty sure linking nonshared is no longer supported under Irix 6.5
> . I seem to remember that this was discussed at length on
> comp.sys.sgi.admin, but this must have been before August 2000, as
> groups.google.com does not seem to let me find the articles. The reason
> - as far as I can remember - was that a) nonshared libs do not give you
> much of an advantage b) for SGI, they are a nightmare to maintain.
> 
> Why do you want to link nonshared? If you want to produce a 6.5
> executable that can run on 6.x with x<5 then there is a different trick
> you can use.
> 

I had a horrible feeling that this was the case.

The reasons for wanting to link non_shared are actually very
straightforward; Irix can produce 3 different types of object (o32, n32
and 64), and if I'm going to distribute executables of Mosflm then I would
have to do this for all three methods if I link -call_shared. 

The big problem that I've found is that many system managers don't install
all the .so libraries properly or maintain them, and a big headache for me
has been trying to get other people's machines sorted out to run the
pre-built executables; another headache is that when .so files aren't
installed correctly, neither are the compilers (usually!) so building
Mosflm is difficult until that problem is sorted out.

Pre-built executables currently account for ~85% of the Mosflm downloads,
so I wanted to maintain this - and Irix6.5 is the most popular (at the
moment)  of these (20% of total downloads). 

Harry 
-- 
Dr Harry Powell, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC Centre, Hills
Road, Cambridge, CB2 2QH