Re: 19990208: netCDF problems with nmake and msoft.mak

>From: "Paxton, Alice" <address@hidden>
>Subject: Problems with nmake and msoft.mak
>Organization: ?
>Keywords: 199902081927.MAA18887 netCDF WIN32 nmake msoft.mak attr.m4

Hi Alice,

> I am installing netCDF 3.4 onto a PC with Windows 95.  The end goal is to
> work with GMT (Generic Mapping Tool).  Software to build netCDF 3.4 is
> Microsoft Developer Studio with Visual C++ 4.0 and Fortran PowerStation 4.0.
> 
> I have read WIN32_INSTALL file and am on step 4 (nmake /f msoft.mak).
> 
> When the nmake command is executed inside MS Dev. Studio or MSDOS window the
> following error occurs.
> 
>       NMAKE: fatal error U1073: don't know how to make 'attr.m4'.
> 
> Can you help?  Please remember I have very little experience using MS Dev.
> Studio.

Yes, somehow the modification dates on the files that were in the
original netcdf-3.4\src\libsrc\ source directory have been changed,
perhaps by copying the files in this directory in a way that didn't
preserve which files were older than other files (in particular, the
"attr.m4" file should have an older modification date/time than
"attr.c").  This kind of information is crucial, because if NMAKE sees
that the "attr.c" file depends on the "attr.m4" file, but the
modification date on the latter is more recent than the former, then
it thinks it must recreate "attr.c" from "attr.m4".

Or alternatively, you might have deleted the "attr.c" or "attr.m4"
file from the netcdf-3.4\src\libsrc\ directory, which would make NMAKE
think it needs to recreate it.

If it was just these one or two files that had the dates changed, the
problem can be fixed most easily by just deleting the line 

  attr.c: attr.m4

from the libsrc\msoft.mak file.  However, if all the relative
modification dates on files have been changed, then you will encounter
the problem again after it is fixed for these two files.  In this
case, the easiest fix is to get the source distribution again from

  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/netcdf-3.4.zip

unzip it in a way that will preserve the file last modification dates
(using WINZIP, for example), and try invoking NMAKE again.  Or just
install the already-compiled binaries from

  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/contrib/win32/netcdf-3.4.win32bin.zip 

that were built with Visual C++ 5.0 and Digital Visual Fortran 5.0.

--Russ

_____________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                         UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                     http://www.unidata.ucar.edu