[Coin-discuss] Status of COIN interface to bonsai

[Lou Hafer]

Brady, & others,

	What's actually in the works is a COIN interface to dylp, the lp
solver embedded in the bonsai MILP code. Stephen Tse did the development over
the summer, then started working on a different project as of September.
There was a hiatus through September and most of October while Stephen and I
concentrated on other things. The current status is that Stephen and I are
wrestling with two development environments and three compilers, trying to
find some compatible version of code. (And, though I'm a bit abashed to admit
it, progress is slowed because this is my first real project with C++ :-).

	I work in a Solaris/Sun Workshop programming environment. Sun farmed
out Workshop development to a company called Forte; currently we're at
edition 6 update 1.  Stephen works in a Solaris/Gnu environment.  Our
computer systems folks recently upgraded us from Gnu 2.95 to Gnu 3.0.

	The COIN interface for bonsai was originally developed by Stephen
using Gnu 2.95 tools. We can also build COIN itself using Gnu 2.95. So we
have working code for the Gnu 2.95 tool set. And probably should have left it
at that.

	But ... right now we can't build COIN in the Workshop environment,
nor can we build it using Gnu 3.0. For obvious reasons, I'd rather be able to
work with COIN in the Workshop environment, and it strikes me that this would
be a nice goal on general principles. The basic problem seems to be that the
Forte C++ compiler is less bright than g++ when it comes to matching actual
code to specialisations of templates. I've been able to beat the problems in
our code, but am just now getting down to work on the COIN code.

	The problems with Gnu 3.0 are, I think, transitory --- the autodetect
seems to be doing something silly. The appearance is that it's lost a basic
library file, leaving reams of undefined symbols. It's a matter of spending
some time and looking carefully at how the makefiles actually work.

	If anyone has successfully built COIN in Sun Workshop, or experienced
similar problems with Gnu 3.0 under Solaris, we'd be interested to hear.

						Lou