[Coin-discuss] environment variables

[Laszlo Ladanyi]

I'm not sure how much general *nix help you'll get here (to be honest this is
probably not the right forum for that), but I give a stab at a few of your
questions.

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Stephan Hennig wrote:

> 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?).

I would strongly suggest to skim through a good unix book. Unfortunately, I
can't suggest any, since I learned the hard way, reading the man pages... In
retrospect I see that starting with a good unix description I could have saved
several months of work. Anybody can suggest a good book?

> 
> 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.

Look again at Makefiles/Makefile.location. As it says at the top:
# If any of the libraries/headers is at a non-standard location (i.e., not    #
# in COIN/{lib,include} or in /usr/{lib,include}) then specify below the      #
# ### Locations ### line where could it be found.                             #
So just page down to the OSL location specification (right now lines 183-188)
and specify the path there.

> 
> (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.

This issue came up just a week ago on this mailing list, and the answer is
that you should not make anything in Bcp, rather you should do a make in the
application directory (see, e.g., Examples/MaxCut). Actually, as of 11/2/2003
the Makefile in Bcp should refuse to do anything if you try to make directly
in the Bcp directory, rather it should print out a message about what you
should do.

> 
> 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.

I hope this will be enough to get you started. Let us know if you have any
troubles.

--Laci

> 
> 
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