SMITH%MCCLB0.MED.NYU.EDU@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (Ross Smith: (212) 340-5356) (01/05/90)
Date sent: 5-JAN-1990 08:53:44 I am very new to ANU-NEWS so things which are obvious to you may not be obvious to me. Also I am a FORTRAN programmer, and C is a mistery to me (when it not just a bad dream). Anyway: I FTPed the V5.9C distribution and un-TARed it here. I then followed the instructions in NEWSBUILD and tried to build it. Two problems arose whcih some additional documnetation in NEWSBUILD might help with: 1) A sub-directory called [.NEWS_DIST] is needed, in addition to [.NEWS_BUILD] and [.NEWS_SRC]. This should be mentioned in NEWSBUILD since it is neater to create it beforehand, rather than after the linkage steps all fail. 2) Something should be said about the C compiler which is to be used. I have V2.4, and this does not come with a full complement of .H files, specifically JPCDEF.H, UAIDEF.H, SORDEF.H, CLIDEF.H are missing. Bob Sloane helped me get started (thanks Bob) and I cribbed a couple of them from a machine with a more current version of C. However, these contained directives like "#pragma nostandard", which were unrecognized by V2.4 (I have yet to figure out what to do about that!). Now I understand that we cannot expect support for primitive versions of C, but V2.4 is not all that old. From my experience, there are only one or two of the definitions from each of these .H files that are actaully used by the programs one writes. So it is often enough to simply copy the lines from the .H file into the code explicitely. This would get over the downward compatibility problem. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Ross Smith, Cell Biology, NYU Medical Center, 550 First Ave., NYC, 10016| |Phone: (212) 340-5356: FAX: (212) 340-8139 (Alternate NYUMC) (212) 340-7190| |E-Mail: SMITH@NYUMED.BITNET (BITNET), SMITH@MCCLB0.MED.NYU.EDU (Internet)| +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+