Re: Installation of netcdf software on IBM RISC 6000/AIX 3.2

Hi Stefano,

> I am attempting to install netcdf version 2.3.2 on an IBM RISC 6000 (AIX
> 3.2.4) machine. According to the installation notes, the software had been
> tested successfully for a couple of hardware platforms including IBM RISC
> 6000.  
>                                              ... No problems were
> encountered during instalation procedure. However, when testing the
> installed software (with nctest), quite a bit of error messages were
> issued. Please advise.

We have observed a problem with the optimizer in the C compiler of AIX 3.2.
The default for our configure script is to specify optimization by using the
"-O" compiler flag, but that causes the netCDF library to be built
incorrectly under AIX 3.2, with the symptom that "make test" will fail.
We tested netCDF version 2.3.2 with CFLAGS=-O for the previous release of
AIX, and it worked OK.

A workaround is to build the netCDF library with CFLAGS="" (or "-g")
explicitly, by setting the environment variable CFLAGS to "" or "-g" before
invoking configure, or by using one of the other methods suggested in the
INSTALL file to prevent the use of the "-O" flag for compilation.

We haven't yet determined which of the source files the optimizer compiles
incorrectly.  When we do, we'll post a more specific fix involving turning
off the optimizer for only those modules.

__________________________________________________________________________
                      
Russ Rew                                              UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                                        P.O. Box 3000
(303)497-8645                                 Boulder, Colorado 80307-3000