Stupid Pet Tricks

There are a number of simple things that one can do during or after the installation process that may make GRASP easier to maintain and/or use at your site. For example, if is often extremely convenient for debugging purposes to have a GRASP library (libgrasp.a) constructed with all the symbol table information turned on, and another library constructed with all the optimization switches turned on. Users who want their code to run as fast as possible can link to the optimized library. Users who want to track down problems within GRASP, or to step through internal GRASP functions can link to the debug library. You can accomplish this easily by building two separate GRASP libraries, as follows. (Note: since the normal C-compiler debugging option is -g the debug library has a _g appended to its name.)

• Edit your SiteSpecific.mysite file so that the debugging switches are turned on (CFLAGS = -g, typically). You may also want to build the GRASP example programs with the ``debug'' versions of the Numerical Recipes libraries, in which case you should set LRECIPES=recipes_cg in SiteSpecific.mysite. In simiilar fashion you might also choose to link to FRAME libraries compiled with debugging turned on.
• Build GRASP as described above, by running
  InstallGRASP SiteSpecific.mysite.
• Make a copy of the GRASP library:
  cp /usr/local/GRASP/lib/libgrasp.a /usr/local/GRASP/lib/libgrasp_g.a
• Make a copy of the ``debug'' GRASP example programs:
  cp -r /usr/local/GRASP/bin /usr/local/GRASP/bin_g
  Note: the /usr/local/GRASP/bin directory contains links to the actual executables, but for most unix systems this copy command will copy the actual files. Your mileage may vary - choose the copy option which copies the files not the links!
• Remove your GRASP installation (i.e. everything but the library and the executables, and original GRASP package) by typing:
  RemoveGRASP
• Modify SiteSpecific.mysite so that the optimization options are turned on (typically, CFLAGS = -O). You should also set the Numerical Recipes library to the optimized versions, typically via LRECIPES=recipes_c in SiteSpecific.mysite. In simiilar fashion you might also choose to link to FRAME libraries compiled with optimization turned on.
• Install GRASP again:
  InstallGRASP SiteSpecific.mysite

Your GRASP installation will now contain two GRASP libraries: /usr/local/GRASP/lib/libgrasp.a and /usr/local/GRASP/lib/libgrasp_g.a and two sets of executables, in
[4]/usr/local/GRASP/bin and /usr/local/GRASP/bin_g.

Another useful trick is if you are building versions of GRASP for several different architectures, on a shared /usr/local/ disk. Here the procedure is the following:

• Create a SiteSpecific.arch1 file for the first machine type.
• Install GRASP in the usual way:
  InstallGRASP SiteSpecific.arch1
• Copy the libraries:
  cp /usr/local/GRASP/lib/libgrasp.a /usr/local/GRASP/lib/libgrasp_arch1.a
• Make a copy of the GRASP example programs:
  cp -r /usr/local/GRASP/bin /usr/local/GRASP/bin_arch1
  Note: the /usr/local/GRASP/bin directory contains links to the actual executables, but for most unix systems this copy command will copy the actual files. Your mileage may vary - choose the copy option which copies the files not the links!
• Remove your GRASP installation (i.e. everything but the library and the executables, and original GRASP package) by typing:
  RemoveGRASP
• Return to the first step above, and begin this process again, but this time for the second machine architecture (i.e. change arch1 to arch2 above).

This method will avoid duplication of source files, documentation, etc, while still providing a set of libraries and executables for different machine types.