Issues with installing OCTANT on Mac OS X

[donglai]

Hi, I'm trying to install OCTANT (http://code.google.com/p/octant/) on my Mac OS X machine (10.5.7 with gcc433, python26+packages installed) and I'm running into several problems, one I can fix, others I can't. The documentation for OCTANT is rather minimal and I'm struggling to figure out how it works.

1. Mac OS X does not like the '-fno-force-mem' flag in nn's makefile, it has to be deleted manually at the moment for it to compile.

2. After installing nn and csa into the /usr/local directory, gridutils configure does not know to look for them there. It complains "configure: WARNING: unable to find header nn.h or csa.h; you will not be able to compile gridbathy".

3. Finally when I run configure for gridgen, it complains "configure: WARNING: unable to find gridnodes.h. You will not be able to compile the library function gridgen_generategrid2(). Please modify your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and re-run this script if necessary."

I know OS X does not use LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable, google says the equivalent is DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. In any case, I was peek inside the configure.in files but couldn't come up with a solution.

Please advice.

Thank you,
Donglai

[cvl]

I don't know if you've looked at these, but both

MacPorts: http://www.macports.org/index.php

and

Fink: http://www.finkproject.org/index.php?phpLang=en

provide linux-like package management behavior for Mac OS. Neither appears to directly provide octant, but both may give you a much more streamlined and friendly way to pull in the dependencies you need.

[donglai]

I already use macports for many things. The issue is not broken dependencies of existing packages in macports, the problem is in configuring and making gridutils and gridgen. They are not recognizing the paths for csa, nn and each other.

[sak007]

Hi, I'm trying to install OCTANT (http://code.google.com/p/octant/) on my Mac OS X machine (10.5.7 with gcc433, python26+packages installed) and I'm running into several problems, one I can fix, others I can't. The documentation for OCTANT is rather minimal and I'm struggling to figure out how it works.

1. Mac OS X does not like the '-fno-force-mem' flag in nn's makefile, it has to be deleted manually at the moment for it to compile.

2. After installing nn and csa into the /usr/local directory, gridutils configure does not know to look for them there. It complains "configure: WARNING: unable to find header nn.h or csa.h; you will not be able to compile gridbathy".

3. Finally when I run configure for gridgen, it complains "configure: WARNING: unable to find gridnodes.h. You will not be able to compile the library function gridgen_generategrid2(). Please modify your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and re-run this script if necessary."

I know OS X does not use LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable, google says the equivalent is DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. In any case, I was peek inside the configure.in files but couldn't come up with a solution.

Please advice.

Thank you,
Donglai

Hi Donglai,

The issue 1 is sort of expected. This flag improved numerical stability of some critical pieces of code in `nn' when compiled by gcc at some point in history (until late) but was to become redundant in later versions. Perhaps, this has already happened. You were right to remove it.

I have no idea why no. 2 or no. 3 could have occur, perhaps for some trivial reason. You may check that all the necessary files have indeed been copied to /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib after you ran "make install" for `nn' and `gridutils': "ls /usr/local/include/nn.h" etc. You may need administrator privileges to run "make install".

BTW - one can checkout the current versions of `nn', `csa' and `gridutils' by running

svn checkout http://nn-c.googlecode.com/svn/nn
svn checkout http://csa-c.googlecode.com/svn/csa
svn checkout http://gridutils-c.googlecode.com/svn/gridutils

-Pavel

[kate]

Thanks for this explanation, Pavel. When you get these with octant, I at least assumed that octant could build all in one go, rather than doing the "make", "make install" for each directory in order, especially since I don't have root access. We'll have to change this, I expect.