Configuration and compilation

You will have received the FoX source code as a tar.gz file.

Unpack it as normal, and change directory into the top-level directory, FoX.

Requirements for use

FoX requires a Fortran 95 compiler - not just Fortran 90. All currently available versions of Fortran compilers claim to support F95. If your favoured compiler is not listed as working below, I recommend the use of g95, which is free to download and use. And if your favourite compiler is listed as not working, then please send a bug report to your compiler vendor.

The list below shows results as tested at the time of release with the 3.0 release of the FoX code (see a special the note on the PGI compilers below.). An up-to-date list of tested compiler version is maintained here.

Known failures:

Results from other compilers are welcome.

As of version 2.0.2, the following other compilers had been tested and are known to work:

PGI compilers

The Portland group compilers are by far the worst performing and buggiest compilers I have had the misfortune to use. Nevertheless, I have tried hard to make FoX work with them. The results are that:

I cannot recommend the use of PGI compilers. Patches to work around PGI problems will be welcomed, but please direct bug reports to the Portland Group.

Configuration

This should suffice for most installations. However:

  1. You may not be interested in all of the modules that FoX supplies. For example, you may only be interested in output, not input. If so, you can select which modules you want using --enable-MODULENAME where MODULENAME is one of wxml, wcml, wkml, sax, dom. If none are explicitly enabled, then all will be built. (Alternatively, you can exclude modules one at a time with --disable-MODULENAME) Thus, for example, if you only care about CML output, and not anything else: ./configure --enable-wcml

  2. If you have more than one Fortran compiler available, or it is not on your PATH, you can force the choice by doing:

    ./configure FC=/path/to/compiler/of/choice

  3. It is possible that the configuration fails. In this case

    • please tell me about it so I can fix it
    • all relevant compiler details are placed in the file arch.make; you may be able to edit that file to allow compilation. Again, if so, please let me know what you need to do.
  4. By default the resultant files are installed under the objs directory. If you wish them to be installed elsewhere, you may do

    ./configure --prefix=/path/to/installation

Note that the configure process encodes the current directory location in several places. If you move the FoX directory later on, you will need to re-run configure.

Compilation

In order to compile the full library, now simply do:

make

This will build all the requested FoX modules, and the relevant examples

Testing

Three test-suites are supplied; in common/test, wxml/test, and wcml/test. In each case, cd to the relevant directory and then run ./run_tests.sh.

(The sax and dom testsuites are available separately. Please contact the author for details.)

The tests will run and then print out the number of passes and fails. Details of failing tests may be found in the file failed.out.

Known failures:
* test_xml_Close_2 sometimes unexpectedly fails - this is not a problem, ignore it.

If any other failures occur, please send a message to the mailing list (FoX@lists.uszla.me.uk) with details of compiler, hardware platform, and the nature of the failure.

Linking to an existing program

A script is provided which will provide the appropriate compiler and linker flags for you; this will be created after configuration, in the top-level directory, and is called FoX-config. It may be taken from there and placed anywhere.

FoX-config takes the following arguments:

If it is called with no arguments, it will expand to compile & link flags, thusly:

   f95 -o program program.f90 `FoX-config`

For compiling only against FoX, do the following:

f95 -c `FoX-config --fcflags` sourcefile.f90

For linking only to the FoX library, do:

f95 -o program `FoX-config --libs` *.o

or similar, according to your compilation scheme.

Note that by default, FoX-config assumes you are using all modules of the library. If you are only using part, then this can be specified by also passing the name of each module required, like so:

FoX-config --fcflags --wcml