Speaker: Dr. Alexander Pletzer, Tech-X Corporation
Abstract:
You may be familiar with building open source codes using the configure
and make commands that are at the heart of autotools, a collection of
programs for configuring, building, and packaging software under Unix.
However, a large number of codes in our community are still built using
hand-written makefiles, an approach that works well for simple projects
but becomes increasingly difficult to support in a world of multiple
architectures (Linux, AIX, Solaris ..., 32 bit vs 64 bit), multiple
compilers (~10 Fortran compilers), and multiple programming languages
(C, C++, and Fortran). Autotools addresses these challenges by providing
a standard set of tools to automate the creation of makefiles.
By walking through simple examples, I will try to convince you how you
can start reaping the benefits of using autotools with little effort. I
will show how to handle external library dependency, how to get mixed
Fortran/C++ code to link, how to apply a filter to some of your files,
and how to solve the Fortran module dependency issue.