[Ifeffit] pgplot and ifeffit installation on current linux systems

[Matt Newville]

Hi Anselm,

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 6:33 AM, Loges, Anselm G <anselm.loges at helsinki.fi>
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
>
> I hope this is the right platform for my question. If not, sorry to bother
> anyone. The question:
>
> Has anyone successfully installed pgplot and ifeffit on a recent Arch
> Linux system and could provide a quick how-to guide (also for the Demeter
> website maybe)? Although I have not yet tested it, my problem may also be
> relevant for current Debian/Ubuntu systems. Here's the situation:
>
>
> I am trying to install ifeffit on a current Arch Linux machine and
> therefore need to install pgplot first. The PGPLOT_install script on the
> respective GitHub page (as linked by a tutorial on the Demeter page, see
> links below) does not work because it relies on several outdated paths to
> dependencies. The one culprit I was able to isolate and fix was the path to
> the X11 libraries, which the script looks for here:
>
> /usr/X11    or /usr/X11R6
>
> but in current Arch Linux (at least in mine, which is Manjaro to be
> precise, link below) is here:
>
> /usr/share/X11
>
> This alone does not fix all problems, there are several dependencies
> missing in the X11 directory and I could not find out what the actual
> relevant package names are in Arch (Debian/Ubuntu names cannot be found).
> Also the config files of pgplot seem to have a bunch of similar problems
> that (at least partially) seem to stem from use of an old fortran-to-c
> translator (f2c) instead of the gcc fortran frontend and missing
> dependencies for that.
>
>
> If I am not mistaken, the latest Ubuntu LTS (16.04.) also has the
> /usr/share/X11 path, so the script should not work there either.
>
>
> I'd be happy to provide an updated installation script if I ever get it
> running but I thought I'd ask if someone has done that already or has
> solved the related problems so as not to invent the wheel anew.
>

I am not aware of anyone updating this installation script.   Of course,
PGPLOT itself is very old and it's build system and assumptions about APIs
for things like PNG graphics, X11, and even how C/Fortran compilers work
together could be beginning to fade anyway.   It predates GCC 4, and so the
official release of gfortran (now more than 10 years ago), by a few years.
I have no idea it it works with LLVM.  In short,  you might be able to get
it to compile and run today.  Eventually, and quite possibly soon, it will
stop working.     If you do get it working and would like to submit a patch
to PGPLOT_Install, I'd be willing to update it.

But also, PGPLOT is not required to build Ifeffit.  In fact, the PGPLOT
graphics are not actually used by Demeter.  So the simplest thing to do
would be to build Ifeffit without PGPLOT.

There could be some build issues with Ifeffit on modern Linux systems --
this is no longer actively maintained, though I have built it myself on
several new-ish distributions.    But if you're willing to go through all
the trouble to install PGPLOT and updating bash scripts, you should really
be putting your time and energy into using Larch.

--Matt
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/pipermail/ifeffit/attachments/20160826/fbf7fbc4/attachment.html>