Re: ffi, and 'needed software' in general

[Sven N. Thommesen]

At 03:15 PM 4/29/1998 -0700, Marcus wrote:
>
>libffi is at:
>
>  ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/needed-software/libffi-1.18.tar.gz
>

If I'm not mistaken, when I downloaded Swarm-1.1 the version of libffi I
got was 1.17. But now, on the ftp site, 1.17 is gone and 1.18 is suddenly
there. 

I don't recall seeing any announcement about a new version. Is 1.18
required now? Or just better in some way? Or irrelevant? 

I note that in the release notes / documentation that accompanies each
release of Swarm, there is just a url reference to "needed software", with
no discussion of which versions of what might be required.

Given the rapidity of development of Swarm, and in the interests of those
who might need to re-run a model they submitted to some journal a year ago,
let me suggest that the swarm team post and maintain a web page that keeps
track of which versions of the 'needed software' do or do not work with
each release of Swarm. (And then make sure those versions of said software
are available on the ftp site.)

This list ought to start with Swarm 1.0.0, or perhaps a little earlier, if
anyone remembers that far back ...

I don't know how realistic it is to want to be able to rerun year-old
models, given the rapid developments in the Linux/Unix world, but
replication is what good modelling calls for. If you have to seriously
upgrade your old model across 3-4 updates to Swarm to be able to run it at
all, how can you be sure it's the 'same' model?

--Sven


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