Molscript-compilation-problems

[mathog at seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu]

In article <60p5cr$ft1 at net.bio.net>, Marc Saric <Marc.Saric at rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de> writes:
>I have a problem concerning compilation of a Fortan77-program:
>
>I have obtained a licensed (academic/non-commercial) copy of Molscript,
>a program written by Ph.D. Per Kraulis from Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc. to
>generate Postscript-drawings of Molecules (from PDB-files).
>The package is written in Fortran on a SGI and has to be compiled by the
>user for his own system. Unfortunately I was not able to compile the
>sources under Debian Linux 1.2 (x86 Linux with ELF-fileformat). As far
>as I can see, I have installed the g77-compiler correctly, but the
>compiler terminates with an error-message.
>Same is with fort77 (a f77 to c translator which utilizes gcc as
>backend-compiler).
>I don't know much about Fortran77, therefore I am not able to solve this
>problem by myself.

Providing the text of the error-message would have been a start, eh?

Anyway, I just built Molscript on some SGIs and had only three minor problems,
all related to the makefiles - I didn't need to touch the code at all.

Method. 

1.  % cd forlib
2.  modify makefile to remove -mips4 (because some of our machines are
    still just indgio, and -mips4 won't run on them)
3.  % make

All modules compiled successfully, but the make FAILED at the line:

  ar ru forlib.a $(OBJ)

where 

OBJ = strutl.o strblk.o ttyiop.o errout.o sncnvt.o lexana.o syntax.o \
  salias.o scmpwd.o sexpnd.o smacro.o squeue.o sstack.o genvar.o \
  v3vecp.o u3vecp.o u3best.o ortho.o lqplan.o cont2d.o c2dtrf.o c3dtrf.o \
  pccurv.o numpro.o sort.o hlptxt.o nxtlun.o colour.o system.o \
  mol.o aacode.o cadm.o reddss.o anarea.o hash.o qwikio.o

I thought that there must be some toxic piece in one of the obj files, so
I did fed the object files into the archive manually, expecting to see a
failure (and so narrow down which one was "bad"):

% ar ru forlib.a strutl.o strblk.o ttyiop.o errout.o sncnvt.o lexana.o syntax.o
% ar ru forlib.a salias.o scmpwd.o sexpnd.o smacro.o squeue.o sstack.o genvar.o
% ar ru forlib.a v3vecp.o u3vecp.o u3best.o ortho.o lqplan.o cont2d.o c2dtrf.o c3dtrf.o
% ar ru forlib.a pccurv.o numpro.o sort.o hlptxt.o nxtlun.o colour.o system.o
% ar ru forlib.a mol.o aacode.o cadm.o reddss.o anarea.o hash.o qwikio.o

Oddly, this worked without error or warning.  

4 % cd ../molscript
5 modify makefile as in (2), above
6 % make

It built molscript correctly, and the program ran when tested.

So, if I had to guess, and from your problem description, I do have to guess,
I would say that the most likely source of your problems are flags
on the f77 lines in the makefile that are not compatible with the f77 on your
system. 

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech 
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