Re: srandom, etc.

[Nelson Minar]

Thanks to everyone for starting to work with Swarm! And I appreciate
people answering each other's questions, that's great.

Ginger Booth:
>Swarm isn't building for me, as srandom, random, and rint aren't
>getting found.  I'll continue trying to figure out how to patch them in
>on my own, but if someone already knows how, I'd appreciate a note.

I'll add "remove srandom and random" calls on the todo list for next
release: all of the code we ship should be using our OO random
library, but some legacy code is still out of date. For now, Rick's
suggestion is good: you can delete the srandom() call in simtools (no
longer needed) and replace random with rand48 (or uniformRandom calls)
in market.

Rick Riolo:
>rint is is /lib/pa1.1/libm.a on my hpux 9.05 machine.
>So in Makefile.conf I did:
>OTHERLIBS=-L/lib/pa1.1 -lm

So hpux has two different libm.a's, one in /lib, one in /lib/pa1.1?
I don't know anything about hpux: which is "better"? If you always
want the /lib/pa1.1 version, then I think just putting
  OTHERLIBDIRS=-L/lib/pa1.1
will fix things nicely. Any understanding why hpux is this way? I'll
put whatever seems best as one (commented out) version in Makefile.conf

Now, as for BLT.. I'm hoping that BLT will work reasonably well on
most Unixes, but that code is less stable than some of the other
things Swarm uses. I've run into some floating point issues under
Linux, for instance: not clear if BLT or gcc is to blame.

Make sure you're using BLT 1.8, the version from uoregon that is
referenced in the install document: it's the only version that
currently works with tk4.0. The BLT author has been promising an
updated version for awhile.

It also pays to double check that all versions of blt, tk, tcl you're
using, linking, including are correct - I once spent eight hours
chasing down a bug that was because of a version mismatch. If you have
several versions of tk installed, it can be hard to find the right
version.

(you can build a quick test of BLT by doing "make testGraph" in the
support/tkobjc directory. It should make a program that draws a little
random time series graph.)

John Carnahan suggests:
>Try adding the libraries -lthread and -lsocket if are not already in
>your makefile.

Never hurts to try, but I think this advice only applies to Solaris 2
machines. Another case where a Unix hides important functions in
obscure libraries. Any other Solaris 2 users out there?

Rick says:
>(The displays for apps/market aren't right, but that's another story,
>I think.)

hmm, in what way? All of the apps should work correctly except for the
graphs in mousetrap and the quit button in a few (nonschedule) apps.