Building Minfast/Reroot with egcs on DigitalUnix Alphas


This page summarizes my experience of building the Minfast and Reroot packages for use on Alphas running DigitalUnix under the egcs compiler system.  My apologies for some of the long line lengths, path names will do that,  particularly with egcs, it seems.  If you print this out from Netscape, it will simply truncate them for you.  How convenient!  If there are any comments or questions about anything here, feel free to e-mail me at  mualem@hep.umn.edu .

Requirements:

The packages require the root libraries, available from  CERN .  The current version is 2.21/08.  I used version 2.20/06, which was the latest version at the time.  Binaries of the root libraries are built for various platforms.  I had trouble with the native DEC/CXX version that was available, so I used the egcs 1.1 version, which of course requires egcs to be installed.  (I didn't write down precisely what the troubles were, but I believe it had to do with the Makefile, other parts seemed to work.)
 

Building egcs:

Using the egcs version introduced some problems, the first of which was that our site did not have an egcs system running.  First I built that, which went smoothly.  Egcs is available from cygnus  at http://egcs.cygnus.com.

Pitfalls in egcs build:

  • Be sure to build egcs with --enable-shared, otherwise root won't find the right .so library.
  • Be sure to use gmake, gnu make, and not the DU make.

    • Building Minfast/Reroot:

    There were some difficulties in building with the egcs compiler, since the makefile was set up for the native compiler I had to alter the setup.source... file that came with the Minfast distribution.  The changes were to the osf1 section of the setup.source.  I changed it to read: 
    if ($arch == 'osf1') then
    
# Path to shared libraries:  using egcs-1.1.1 in /data/minos1/mualem/bin
   setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH .:${ROOTSYS}/lib:/data/minos1/mualem/bin/lib/gcc-lib/alphaev56-dec-osf4.0d/egcs-2.91.60:/data/minos1/mualem/egcsminfast/MINFAST/lib.osf1

endif
    Yes, the library names do get rather long with egcs.
    The second change, is to the Make.include file.  Again, the changes are to the osf1 section.  It now reads:
      
    ifeq ($(arch),osf1)
# alpha with egcs-1.1.1 installed in /data/minos1/mualem/bin/
CXX           = g++
CXXFLAGS      = -O -I$(ROOTSYS)/include -fPIC -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions \
                -mcpu=ev5 -D__osf__ -D__alpha
LD            = g++
LDFLAGS       = -g
SOFLAGS       = -Wl,-expect_unresolved,* -shared
GLIBS         = $(ROOTLIBS) $(ROOTGLIBS) -L/usr/X11R6/lib \
                -lXpm -lX11 -lm -lfor -lg2c

DllSuf   := so
FORT     := g77
FORTOPTS := $(FFLAGS) -fno-second-underscore -g -c -O $(F77INCS)
RANLIB   := ranlib 
INCLUDES := $(INCLUDES) \
        -I/data/minos1/mualem/bin/lib/gcc-lib/alphaev56-dec-osf4.0d/egcs-2.91.6
0/include \
        -I/data/minos1/mualem/bin/lib/gcc-lib/alphaev56-dec-osf4.0d/egcs-2.91.6
0/include/g++
SOCMD     = $(LD)
endif

    Pitfalls:

  • Again, be sure to use gmake, gnu make, and not the DU make.
  • Be sure to use your new egcs compiler, and one that matches your root distribution, otherwise there will be trouble.  Use which to find out which gcc etc., and rehash if necessary if you changed your path.
  • There was a pesky little problem in ADAMO_READ.F that I had to fix by editing the source.  It appears that the egcs g77 compiler did not like having an unknown length string concatenation in the error print statements.  For example:
    •         It did not like:
                print *,' File: '//ADAMO_FILE(1:LENOCC(ADAMO_FILE)),  ....
        While it was fine with:
                print *,' File: ',ADAMO_FILE(1:LENOCC(ADAMO_FILE)),  ....
        where the only difference was in the concatenation.
        There were 6 lines changed in this way.  It is interesting though that
        in other statements, not print statements the syntax was acceptable.
  • This may be a local version problem, but the LABYRINTH environment variables from the current distribution have underscores in them, while the minfast/reroot env variables do not.  e.g. LABYRINTH_LIB, and LABYRINTHLIB.  I worked around this by defining the LABYRINTH env variables first, and then setenv'ing them to the non-underscored variety.  For example:
    •         setenv LABYRINTHLIB $LABYRINTH_LIB
  • This may also be a local config problem, but one I found.  The adamo library libtap.a is not found in $LABYRINTHLIB/libtap.a as is expected.  My workaround was to find it, and just relink rerootjob with it specified explicitly.

    •  

    Running

    Running with the egcs version requires some setup also.  Since the libraries are not necessarily setup for you.  This can be done in a .login, or as a separate script.  I chose to do it separately, in a script called minvars which is as follows: 
    #
setenv EGCS_DIR /data/minos1/mualem/bin
setenv MINFASTDIR /data/minos1/mualem/egcsminfast
setenv ROOTSYS /data/minos1/mualem/egcsroot/root 
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ${ROOTSYS}/lib:${MINFASTDIR}/MINFAST/lib.osf1:${EGCS_DIR}/lib/gcc-lib/alphaev56-dec-osf4.0d/egcs-2.91.60
    After this, it is possible to run from the directory where minfastjob and rerootjob were built.
     

    Pitfalls:

  • This may be mine alone, but running rerootjob, you have to tell it to get N+1 events if you want N events.  rerootjob -n 2  will get you one event from each input file (specified in reco_minos.gaf_list), and one geometry event.