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CERN Program Library Office CN/ASD
As from release 96A of CERNLIB, we shall be using the combination of CVS, gmake, makedepend, Imake and the C preprocessor for the management of the CERN Program Library source code and for its installation.
We strongly recommend new experiments to use these tools and existing experiments to migrate to them as soon as is convenient.
As from release 96A of the CERN Program Library, source files will no longer be distributed in PATCHY card file format (.car) or in CMZ format (.cmz).
In CNL 218, we described our initial investigations regarding the possible use of the Concurrent Version System, or CVS, for the management of the CERN Program Library source code. Following this exercise, and in common with the general trend within HEP, we began a program of work to migrate to industry standard tools for the code management and installation of CERNLIB. The tools that we have chosen include CVS and gmake from the Free Software Foundation and the X11 consortium tools Imake and makedepend. In addition, the ANSI C preprocessor is used to handle the inclusion of "include files" (cf. PATCHY sequences) and to handle conditional compilation (cf. PATCHY +SELF statements).
The conversion process is now well underway, and we will use the new tools and procedures to build and distribute the CERN Program Library as of release 96A.
We fully expect many experiments to follow the same route (some, of course, have already preceded us!) and therefore plan the following steps to help the migration process:
The updated installation guide will be available by the time of the 96A release of CERNLIB, and the courses will be given as required, starting in the Spring of 1996.
Books on Imake, make and gmake are already available through the UCO book service, as is documentation on CVS. Additional information, including migration experiences, can be found through the CERNLIB World Wide Web pages, e.g., code_management_conventions.
Imake, gmake, makedepend and the C preprocessor will all be available on Unix, VMS and NT platforms, whereas CVS will initially only be available on Unix. The working assumption is that the master code repository will reside on a Unix platform, e.g. in AFS, and will be accessed over the network on all other platforms, as is performed for the CERNLIB installation.