03.28.06
My software port has a user!
The good news: Someone’s using my Windows port of OpenFOAM. It’s nice to know that it’s actually going to be useful to somebody.
The bad news: I know this, of course, because they’ve posted a bug report to say it doesn’t work for them.
Turns out that a large part of the problem was fairly obvious in hindsight. The original OpenFOAM package contains environment setup files for both bash and tcsh, and I had modified them both for use under Cygwin. However, since I use tcsh, I had completely neglected to test the bash scripts, and there were several typos in one of them. The other problem was that, since the OpenFOAM port uses a local copy of GCC 4.0.2, rather than the Cygwin system copy of GCC, this user had decided to uninstall his system GCC to avoid any possible confusion – and thereby flushed out a bug where the make system was hardwired to use the C preprocessor installed as /bin/cpp, rather than the one in the local copy of GCC. This one dates back to the original Linux version of the software, so I’ve in turn filed a bug report on that.
Aside from that, there were a number of complications that amounted to reminders that, whenever the build process goes awry, it’s important to clean up any incomplete results so that they won’t perpetuate the problem after the actual bug is fixed.
So, it looks like everything is fixed now, but I’m waiting for a final confirmation that it all works before I push all the bugfixes into a new version and post it.