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.
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.
In the event that you need to write a code targetted at multiple compilers, including some which have bugs preventing FoX compilation, please note the possibility of producing a dummy library.
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:
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:
PGI 5.1 is completely broken. Compilation is impossible, too few F95 features are supported.
PGI 6.1-6 and 6.2-3, and 7.0-2 are usable. All of FoX will be compiled, and most of the functionality is available, with the exception of any array-output routines, which the compiler runtime cannot handle. In practice, this means that most of WXML, and all of SAX and DOM are safe for use. Segfaults will be generated in the use of WCML.
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.
In order to generate the Makefile, make sure that you have a Fortran compiler in your PATH
, and do:
./configure
This should suffice for most installations. However:
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
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
It is possible that the configuration fails. In this case
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.
You may be interested in dummy compilation. This is activated with the --enable-dummy
switch (but only works for wxml/wcml currently).
./configure --enable-wcml --enable-dummy
In order to compile the full library, now simply do:
make
This will build all the requested FoX modules, and the relevant examples
Several testsuites are available for the different modules of the library. To run them all, simply run make check
from the top-level directory. This will run the individual testsuites, and collate their results.
If any failures occur (unrelated to known compiler issues, see the up-to-date list), 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.
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:
--fcflags
: return flags for compilation--libs
: return flags for linking--wxml
: return flags for compiling/linking against wxml--wcml
: return flags for compiling/linking against wcml--sax
: return flags for compiling/linking against saxIf 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
Because of the shortcomings in some compilers, it is not possible to compile FoX everywhere. Equally, sometimes it is useful to be able to compile a code both with and without support for FoX (perhaps to reduce executable size). Especially where FoX is being used only for additional output, it is useful to be able to run the code and perform computations even without the possibility of XML output.
For this reason, it is possible to compile a dummy version of FoX. This includes all public interfaces, so that your code will compile and link correctly - however none of the subroutines do anything, so you can retain the same version of your code without having to comment out all FoX calls.
Because this dummy version of FoX contains nothing except empty subroutines, it compiles and links with all known Fortran 95 compilers, regardless of compiler bugs.
To compile the dummy code, use the --enable-dummy
switch. Note that currently the dummy code is only available for the WXML and WCML modules.