[MINC-development] Re: time for 1.1?

[Peter NEELIN]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Steve ROBBINS wrote:

> Since the whole build system has been revamped, I'm making a
> PRE-release source package available at
>
>     www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/~stever/Software/Prerelease

This is great!

One very minor point, but perhaps of interest for historical accuracy:
MINC development was started in 1992, not 1993 (see the AUTHORS file). The
first RCS check-in was on September 9, 1992 (according to cvs log, which
agrees with my memory), although library development happened mostly in
the summer (while Alan was away for five weeks canoeing down the
Mackenzie). Likewise, volume_io development started in 1992 (check
Prog_utils/alloc.c), although MINC support was not added until early 1993.

A note about minccalc: I tried to make sure that the build would not try
to run flex or bison unless the sources were changed so that people
without these tools could still build the package. That is why the
corresponding .c files are checked in. It is important to ensure that the
.c files are checked in after the .y and .l files (so that make will
not see them as out of date) and that the build process will only run flex
and bison if necessary. It seems to do this (although reading the make
output is quite something!), but I thought that I would mention it as
something to keep in mind.

> We haven't put any energy into the fortran stuff.  If the FORTRAN
> bindings are important to you, let us know!

I stopped building the fortran by default, but left it in for those who
might be interested. Since the old Makefile (now broken) and the .c files
(yes, the fortran interface is in C) are all there, it should be fairly
easy for someone who cares to build the wrappers by hand and add them to
the library (I think that it was only ever used under irix).

            Peter
----
            Peter Neelin (neelin@bic.mni.mcgill.ca)