Re: Going postal from installing Swarm

[Theodore C. Belding]

Hi-
To be fair to Swarm, I think you're just experiencing the fun of installing
software on Unix.  Of course, having to maintain two versions of Tcl/Tk
makes things more complicated, but it's pretty standard stuff.  There's
just a lot of little details that you have to remember to get just right.
It helps to take notes of everything you do, so that you remember for next
time.  It took me 4 or 5 times to get all the details right the very first
time I tried compiling gcc; compared to that, installing Swarm is trivial.
:)

To find out what exactly is going on when you try to compile heatbugs, add
the option "-v" to the EXTRACFLAGS= line in Makefile.conf in the swarm
directory.  You'll want to take this out again when you've fixed
everything, since it tells gcc to be very chatty about what it's doing.
You should be able to tell from this exactly what Tcl/Tk libraries and
headers are being used.

As for resetting things so that swarm can compile, if you really did
install Tcl/Tk and BLT correctly, all you have to do is edit the first few
lines of Makefile.conf so that the compiler knows where to find everything
(including Tcl/Tk, X11, etc.):
OTHERINCDIRS=
OTHERLIBDIRS=
OTHERLIBS=

This should be all that you have to do, unless you changed other parts of
Makefile.conf.  Remember that the order in which you put the -I and -L
options matters.  For instance, if you put -L/usr/lib before
-L/usr/local/src, then it will use 7.5/4.1 instead of 7.4/4.0, which isn't
what you want.  And remember that Swarm expects the Tcl/Tk libs and headers
to be named tcl.h, tk.h, libtcl.a, and libtk.a, respectively.  You may have
to make some softlinks, from libtcl7.4.a to libtcl.a, etc., using ln -s.
Hope that helps.
-Ted


At 9:38 PM -0800 10/31/96, Benedikt Stefansson wrote:
>Hello there,
>
>I used to like Swarm. I used to work with Swarm every day.
>I wanted to tell the whole world about Swarm.
>
>But then of course I had never actually had to install
>Swarm myself.
>
>You'll forgive me, I am going a bit postal here after spending
>the better part of two days trying to install Swarm. My problem boils
>down to this: I installed a fresh version of RedHat 4.0 with all
>the bells and whistles on a Pentium 100 Mhz. This distribution
>includes tcl7.5 and tk4.1 among other things, but of course
>Swarm wants tcl7.4 and tk4.0.
>
>To cut a long and very painful story short I made the mistake
>of installing tcl7.4 and tk4.0 in the same directories as the later
>versions, in the /usr hierarchy. After wasting numerous hours on getting
>BLT2.1 to work, I changed my strategy and created a directory under
>/usr/local/src, reinstalled the right (older) versions of tcl/tk there
>and now was able to get BLT2.1 to compile and run the demos.
>
>But now Swarm is stalling - the libraries make like a piece
>of cake, but when I try to compile heatbugs all hell breaks loose
>at the link stage: From the billions of error messages that
>spew out it seems that the linker is still searching in the
>/usr/lib directory, finding the _newer_ version of tk/tcl and
>then everything goes haywire (only a conjecture, though).
>
>I pray that someone can tell me what to do: For example can I get Swarm
>to forget about tk4.1/tcl7.5 and use the older versions that I have in
>/usr/local/src/*.? Which files have to be linked, variables and paths
>reset etc.?
>
>Regards,
>-Benedikt
>
>[I am skipping a lot of hurdles/small glitches/patches here along
>the way, which I hope to write up and share with interested parties
>once I have actually accomplished the task of getting Swarm to run
>on the damn box - by the way thanks Pietro Terna for the writeup
>on installing Swarm on Linux you posted the other day.]
>
>----------------
>Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
>Center for Computable Economics     Tel. (310) 825-1777
>Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
>Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          http://cce.sscnet.ucla.edu


--
Ted Belding                      <mailto:address@hidden>
University of Michigan Program for the Study of Complex Systems
<http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~streak/>