May 22, 2019

Grinder - Building the mirror package for IRAF

Note that IRAF is a collection of 32 bit executables. These run just fine on a 64 bit system, and nobody is interested in tackling the business of getting them converted to 64 bit.

A thing called "mkpkg" is the engine that handles all of this, so it may be useful to look at its documentation.

You must use the csh

IRAF package building is heavily tied to the csh. In short, to build IRAF packages, your login shell must be csh. In my case, I use the "tcsh" and this works fine.

If you are like me and have a nice bash environment set up with command completion and vi style keystroke editing, you will go mildly crazy running the csh, but that is the price you have to pay. No doubt tcsh could be tuned as well -- and maybe you want to look into this if you intend to make iraf package building your career.

You may read that it is possible to use bash, but this is simply not true. I spent days chasing weird errors having to do with the propogation of environment variables, and it just is not worth any more time. Forget about building under bash. What I do is set up a special user dedicated to building IRAF packages that I call "irafdude" and make his login shell tcsh and this solved all my problems.

While you are setting this up, if you are like me and habitually use "vi" keystrokes to edit your command history, you should add this line to your .cshrc to avoid going insane: 

bindkey -v
While you are at it, put all the following into your .cshrc so you will be ready for package building (see below). 
setenv iraf /iraf/iraf/
setenv IRAFARCH linux
setenv mirror /iraf/iraf/extern/mirror/
source /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/irafuser.csh

Note the /iraf/iraf/ path. If your IRAF does not live there, you should make it so before going any further with this. (If it doesn't, whoever installed it was clueless and/or was not following instructions).

You probably don't care, but the root of the problem is that the iraf build system makes heavy use of aliases. These get propogated to child processes by the csh, but not necessarily by bash. When I tried to use bash, I got all kinds of terrible problems, even runaway process generation recursion that locked up my system and required a reboot. It does not get much worse than that.

Get the code to start with

I go to one of our old suns and tar up the mirror package that I find there. This includes all of the source code, including the source code for the VxWorks computers (which is handy, because it keeps everything in one place). Then on my linux system, with IRAF installed, there is a directory /iraf/iraf/extern. This is where you are supposed to put new packages like this. 
cd /iraf/iraf/extern
mkdir mirror
cd mirror
tar xvf /home/tom/mirror.tar
The starting point is thusly the SPARC package we currently use on the old suns.

Setting up the environment and various libraries

In /home/irafdude, I added the following to the .cshrc 
setenv iraf /iraf/iraf/
setenv IRAFARCH linux
setenv mirror /iraf/iraf/extern/mirror/
source /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/irafuser.csh

32 bit libraries

Depending on what 32 bit libraries you already have installed on your linux system you may not need all of this, or you may need things that I already had and took for granted. I am running fedora, and "dnf" is the package manager, so the following commands do the trick for what I need: 
dnf install glibc.i686
dnf install glibc-devel.i686
dnf install ncurses-compat-libs.i686
When I was missing libraries, and tried to run mkpkg, I got messages like the following: 
$ mkpkg -p mirror linux
 /iraf/iraf/unix/bin.linux/mkpkg.e: No such file or directory
However, the file mkpkg.e exists and is executable. What is going on?
This is a highly misleading error message. What is actually going on is that certain 32 bit libraries are missing. (namely glibc.i686 from the list above).

Build the mirror package

Once you sort out the shell, environment, and libraries, building the mirror package is pretty simple.

You must do this inside of the IRAF tree as shown below. One more tricky, fussy IRAF thing. 

cd /iraf/iraf/extern/mirror
mkpkg -p mirror linux
mkpkg -p mirror >& spool
mkpkg -p mirror summary
The game is to look at "spool" to make sure there are no errors.

Ownership games

I now keep this under Git with the repository owned by user tom. But these files must be owned (or writeable anyway) by user "irafdude". So, I end up changing ownerships back and forth. In general I have 3 windows with different identities (root, tom, irafdude). I go to the root window and type "chown -R tom:tom mirror" or "chown -R irafdude:irafdude mirror" as needed. With the files owned by "irafdude" I can do the mkpkg commands shown above. With the files owned by "tom" I can do "git commit". Yes it is obnoxious and awkward, don't get me started. All of this because we must use the csh and because I sure as heck am not going to make the csh my login shell.

Let's try it

File ownerships are important. Unless you want to go insane, I recommend doing this after putting the package source in place. 
su
cd /iraf/iraf/extern
chown -R irafdude .
You only have to do the above once. Then do this: 
su - irafdude
cd /iraf/iraf/extern/mirror
mkpkg -p mirror linux
mkpkg -p mirror >& spool
mkpkg -p mirror summary
Amazingly, all of this still works on my Fedora 29 system.
The last command above yields: 
Sat May 25 08:26:37 MST 2019
Subdirectory src/oven/menusc is up to date
Subdirectory src/oven/menusm is up to date
Subdirectory src/ovenr is up to date
Subdirectory src/odisp is up to date
Subdirectory src/ograph is up to date
Subdirectory src/xytran is up to date
Subdirectory src/imagemask is up to date
Subdirectory src/smooth is up to date
Subdirectory src/util is up to date
ranlib libpkg.a
Updated 1 files in libpkg.a
Object x_mirror.o is up to date
move `xx_mirror.e' to `mirrorbin$x_mirror.e'
purge directory `mirrorbin$'
!date
Sat May 25 08:26:37 MST 2019
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's home page / [email protected]