Please indulge me in a few comments, since my troubles with root under
WIndoes NT spawned a thread about what the best way is to distribute the
source of root.
I was interested in getting and building root as quickly and easily as
possible to fix a bug in command line processing that I was seeing on my
system (WinNT 4.0) and others were not seeing on their WinNT 4.0 systems.
Here is what I did:
1) Download root.cmz
2) Download the cmz system
3) unzip cmz into an appropriate directory
4) copy root.cmz into %ROOTSYS%
5) copy cmzlogon.kumacs from the readme file into my home directory
6) run cmz and follow instructions from readme file and from correspondence
with Rene Brun
7) there were some small problems, so I emailed Rene Brun and Valery Fine,
both of whom responded quickly and helped me fix the problems very quickly
8) Now I run cmz, type in a single command, and spend 10 minutes grading
homework while root builds
This is a very good way to do things. From my point of view, CMZ is much
more painless to install and run from a simple-minded user's point of view
than installing a bunch of GNU tools (I don't like installing the CygWin
tools, but this is only a matter of personal preference. Others may feel
differently.)
I still have questions about how to work with CMZ, but the time it takes me
to get good answers or to figure things out for myself is pretty short, so
I am happy working with CMZ.
I am not a representative ROOT user and I don't think that my opinions
should be a big deal in influencing future ROOT development, but I thought
it would be worth sharing my experiences with this list.
The issue of tying to Microsoft tools vs. free tools is not binary. There
is no reason CMZ could not be used in conjunction with the GNU compiler
suite, nor (as Matthew Langston points out) any reason why the GNU make
tools could not be used with the Microsoft compiler. However, working with
CMZ has been much easier than many experiences I have had working with
distributed makefiles and configuring the GNU CygWin suite for WinNT was
far from trivial the last time I looked at it.
One final comment: The complexity of Microsoft's pricing structure may
confuse some of the issues raised by Matthew Langston. The street price for
Visual C++ professional is $480. For academic users (students/faculty) the
price is $99.95. This may still be prohibitive, but is substantially lower
than the $900 figure that Matthew quotes. The bigger complication is that
according to Valery Fine, to build the fortran modules under Win32
currently requires Digital Visual Fortran, which is much more expensive.
Again, I certainly don't want to spark any flames. These are just my
feelings and I emphasize that I am not the typical root user. The typical
root user may well be close to 180 degrees from my phase. I post these
thoughts only in the hope that they may be helpful to others.
Best wishes to all, and profound thanks to Rene Brun and Valery Fine for
holding my hand through this experience,
Jonathan
===========================================================================
Jonathan M. Gilligan <jonathan.gilligan@vanderbilt.edu>
Research Assistant Professor of Physics (615) 343-6252
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Box 1807-B Fax: 343-7263
6823 Stevenson Center
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235 Dep't Office: 322-2828
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