[Opengrads-devel] Supplibs heads up

[Jennifer A. <jm...@co...>]

Dear All,

I have done a lot of work on the supplibs, getting ready for releases  
of 2.0.0 (really soon) and 2.1.a0 (not sure when). For 2.0.0, there  
are new versions of zlib, netcdf, hdf5, jasper, and grib2. These are  
the libs I feel it is necessary to keep up to date, to make sure we  
take advantage of performance enhancements. For 2.1 (the cairo  
release), there are 6 new ones: pkgconfig, Xrender, pixman, freetype,  
fontconfig, and cairo. I can statically link GrADS with all of these.  
The linear algebra library clapack will also be in 2.1, but I have not  
started working with it at all yet. All of my configure options and  
notes for building are in http://iges.org/grads/gadoc/supplibs.html

For the cairo build, there are still a couple of outstanding issues I  
have not yet resolved:

1. The fontconfig library requires the presence of some local  
configuration files, they are generated as you build the library and  
are installed in ./etc/fonts under the directory where you install  
fontconfig. The environment variable FONTCONFIG_FILE points to the  
location of these config files. But there is a portability problem  
because the binary distributions do not include these files.  
Inconsistency between available fonts on each system the library is  
built on is going to be a headache.

2. I struggled a lot to pare down the list of libraries that cairo  
needs in order to enable only the features that are relevant for  
GrADS. For testing, I used a dynamically linked build of cairo  
installed with macports and compared performance with my own built- 
from-source version. One difference I have not yet resolved is  
painting with a pattern fill instead of a color. I have pushed that  
problem to the back of my list for the moment.

I thought you might want to know where things stand. Please be aware  
that there may be some minor changes yet to come for 2.1 supplibs.

--Jennifer