[Pw_forum] Excess of "Modules" references in the Makefiles

[marsamos at democritos.it]

Inter-cross (and excess) dependencies  is one of the problems that we 
should "solve", in some way, for simplifying the maintainance and 
future developments .... suggestions are wellcome as well as "hands".

thank you Riccardo

Layla
   Quoting Riccardo Di Meo <dimeo at democritos.it>:

> Paolo Giannozzi wrote:
>> On Feb 6, 2010, at 17:52 , Riccardo
>>
>>
>>> I would suggest to turn the Modules objects into a static library (as
>>> for the libpw.a library), and link all applications against it instead
>>>
>>
>> good suggestion, but it was already tried, several years ago, and
>> at least one compiler didn't like it. It took several attempts before
>> converging to a satisfactory installation mechanism that was
>> working on even the most exotic machines.
>>
> Mmmh, I understand why this is a problem, however I thought that this
> approach would have been feasible, since the pw.x compilation seems to
> require it anyway (pw.x gets build from libpw.a), so I don't understand
> why the same mechanism shouldn't apply to Modules objects too.
>
>> Maybe it is no longer a problem: a lot of hardware that used to be
>> important in scientific computing (dec alpha, cray, sgi, hp, ...)
>> either no longer exists or it has  moved to "standard", so to speak,
>> hardware and software. So, it is worth to try again, but it has to be
>> tried for:
>> - ifort
>> - pgi
>> - gfortran
>> - g95
>> - xlf (including bluegene machines)
>> - ftn (cray)
>> - nec sx* machines
>> - sun machines
>> - any more important case I have forgotten.
>>
>> P.
>>
>
> I'd like to contribute on that, however I don't have a way to put my
> hand on at least 1/3 of the architectures/compilers you mentioned (some
> of them in fact I have never heard of: I admit I'm quite impressed :-) ).
>
> As an "academical" discussion, is there a point to provide
> _installation_ support for such a large number of architectures?
>
> Notwithstanding that it _is_ admirable to do so, and that it would ease
> the installation on more exotic (and probably powerful) machines, I
> think that local administrators and users should be able to fix the
> minor incompatibilities themselves (moreover because if a code can't
> link to a static library in a set architecture, the local
> users/administrator probably encountered the issue many times and know
> already how to break the .a file into objects or to change the makefile
> and fix the installation).
>
> As for my personal point of view, I think that a software like QE should
> strive as much as possible to keep source code compatibility (e.g. not
> introduce GCCisms, Ifortism and so on), but leave the
> installation/compilation minor issues to the administrators, on the
> ground that it spares them only some little "nuisances" but is a
> maintenance nightmare for you.... Just my personal opionion anyway.
>
> Cheers (and thanks for the attention)
> Riccardo
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr. L. Martin-Samos
tel. +39 040 3787 429
CNR-DEMOCRITOS and
International School for Advanced Studies (ISAS-SISSA)
via Beirut 2-4
34151 Trieste Italy

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