[daip] AIPS Installation

[Eric Greisen]

Greg Castanon writes:
 > Hello, I'm a student at Washington University in St. Louis, picking up
 > a project that requires the decoding and use of some of the data from
 > the VLA.  I figured that installing the AIPS would be a good start. 
 > I've downloaded it and run it (under Sun's CommonWindows desktop,
 > using the GNU compilers)...however, I get the following errors (when I
 > try to compile F2PS.c, and then for subsequent files):
 > 
 > Parse error before "ppthreat_attr_t"
 > warning:  no semicolon at end of struct or union
 > Parse error before "}"
 > 
 > After a certain number ot these errors, the installation fails.
 > 
 > Have you had any experience with errors such as these?  Is there any
 > further information I could provide that would be helpful?
 > 
 > Many thanks in advance.

This error is quite suprising - it must arise in a Solaris include
file.  F2PS.C includes only very basic system includes and is itself
very simple.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

I fear some incompatibility between gcc and the system include files
although this seems a very basic C error.  I have looked for the
string ppthrea on our Solaris and LInux systems in and below
/usr/include and have not found it.

gcc/g77 should work - the SUL FDEFAULTS.SH even has suitable
parameters in it for the g77 compiler.  The SUN compiler is generally
superior on Solaris and is usually at 

COMPILER="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/f77"

But you have not gotten anywhere near needing those.  Instead a little
service program we have not touched in many years is failing.  You
need to investigate which compiler is actually being used at this
point and look for the source of the trouble.  We have a find
operation coded in $SYSUNIX called AIGREP:

AIGREP ppthrea /usr/include '*.h'

install.pl is doing

$CCOM -O -o $i F2PS.c

where $CCOM is the value on the CCOM line in the file ~/.AIPSRC.

I hope this helps.

Eric Greisen