[Coin-discuss] environment variables

[Stephan Hennig]

Hello,

a few days ago I asked if there are some experiences with COIN and
Borland C++ Builder (BCB). I couldn't get positive answers and so I
tried to port COIN to BCB. Unfortunately, I have to say that this is
stopped for two reasons:

(i) Progress was too slow. I'm currently writing my diploma thesis and I
spent too much time with this.

(ii) Recently Borland announced C++ BuilderX (CBX), a cross-platform IDE
which supports a multitude of compilers. Before I heard of CBX the plans
were to port Coin to BCB and then try Kylix for *visual* cross-platform
development, which *has* to be an option for future work (a business
company is involved with my diploma thesis). CBX supports g++ under
Linux and under Windows as well using MinGW. I had only few problems
(compared to my experiments with BCB) compiling Coin under Windows with
CBX, so I'm looking forward using Coin under Windows and Linux in the
future.

With the knowledge of CBX, to avoid any further unexpected delays at
this stage and because of the few problems under Windows, I now decided
using Linux for my work (IIRC there were some problems including a
time-related header file, but I am definitely willing to address these
issues more precisely later when I'm back using Windows.).

My experiences are now as follows: no matter what you decide to do to
avoid a specific problem, the quantity of problems stays the same. Now
using Red Hat 9.0 (with experiences on SuSe and Caldera some years ago)
I'm rather (re)new to Linux. Unfortunately, Red Hat Linux has only
little beginner-style documentation. It took me days to find out how to
install OSL (the './' in front of 'install_osl' was missing and no-one
told me) or how to set environment variables (Having ~/.profile,
~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile, beginner, choose one of them! Ehm, ...
me?). More funny but although annoying, the tranlators of the german
documentation had no sense for making explanations logically clear, i.e.
they instruct you to start 'gedit' and then to type in 'gedit
~/.somefile' (in the editor?).

So in the last days I've had a lot to read but only few results. Before
I ask my simple question I have to admit that I'm not very familiar with
makefiles. But with great satisfaction and a little smile I realized
that the directories Coin/, Vol/, Clp/, Clg/ and Osi/ (without OSL
interface enabled) make/compile fine. But

(i) I want to use COIN with OSL. Enabeling the OSL interface in
Makefiles/Makefile.location I get an error complaining that ekk_c_api.h
cannot be found when making Osi/. That header file is located in
/usr/local/osllib/include/ . Seems I have to define an environment
variable OSLROOT or similar.

(ii) When trying to make Bcp/ I get an error message 'Cannot create
directory /dep'. In the makefile I can see a reference to the variable
BCPROOT. I tried to set this to /home/work/COIN/Bcp as well as to
/home/work/COIN . When BCPROOT is set another error arises. Some files
in a strange path '/home/work/COIN//Bcp/...' cannot be found - the
double slash after where BCPROOT points to.

Could you please give me a short advice, which environment variables
have to be defined and where they have to point to when using BCP or
more generally COIN with OSL? I can't read any documentation anymore (at
least at the moment).

Kind regards,
Stephan Hennig

PS. Sorry for the long story. I'll keep it short in the future.