I'll just add another voice to represent those who work with older
systems. If nothing else, I'll confirm that my group is one who actively
uses a 4.1.2 system all the time as our primary system and there are no
plans to upgrade this anytime soon.
I think that most AMBER developers are much closer to the edge with regard
to O/S upgrades than the AMBER user community, so what is old for most
developers is 'stable' to most of the users. Maintaining support for O/S
that are 5-ish years old (e.g. CentOS 5.6) is not crazy in my opinion.
Cheers,
Brent
On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 2:51 AM, Scott Brozell <sbrozell.rci.rutgers.edu>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I occasionally build with gnu 4.1.2 on an old cluster.
> The main reason to continue support is that 4.1.2 is the default
> on old red hat platforms, but we shouldn't put much effort into
> that support. I second Dan's call to deprecate 4.1.2 rather than make
> it obsolete (i volunteer to out procrastinate Dan ;-).
>
> Much of the build did work recently; the last time i built with it on
> Mon Mar 2 23:17:59 EST 2015
> # Amber configuration file, created with: ./configure -nofftw3 gnu
> i fixed at least 1 compilation failure; the main issues left were, eg,
> In file prmtop_type.F90:40
> character, allocatable, dimension(:) :: atom_name
> 1
> Error: Attribute at (1) is not allowed in a TYPE definition
>
> as well as some python related issues that i did not investigate
> but felt might be due to the 2.4 python version on this old cluster
> or due to an unpristine repo:
>
> IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
> 'chemistry/amber/openmmreporters.py'
>
> byte-compiling
> /nfs/10/srb/amber/amber/lib/python2.4/site-packages/pymsmtmol/readpdb.py to
> readpdb.pyc
> SyntaxError: ('future feature absolute_import is not defined',)
>
>
> scott
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 09:09:55PM -0600, Daniel Roe wrote:
> > I have no problem with dropping support. However, maybe for this
> > release (or future releases) we add a flag that just disables the
> > build of the affected components, so that systems still rocking the
> > old school compilers have a relatively simple option for getting the
> > majority of Amber working. I will volunteer to implement this if it
> > ends up being the consensus. If we just want to drop 4.1.2 support
> > entirely I have no strong objections.
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 8:53 PM, Jason Swails <jason.swails.gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > Due to my recent work/attempts to get Amber working with GCC 4.1.2
> again, I wanted to raise the question of whether or not we should drop
> support for this particular compiler altogether. I???m personally in favor
> of dropping support for the following reasons:
> > >
> > > - It is a limiting compiler; 3D-RISM, mdgx, part of the sander API,
> and the PBSA FFT solver do not work because fftw-3 uses features not
> supported by that version of GCC.
> > > - GCC 4.1.2 was released over 8 years ago, and only RHEL 5 (superseded
> by RHEL 6/7, released in 2007, and nearing end-of-life) is still in use (?)
> and ships with this version of GCC; even it has GCC 4.4 in its yum
> repositories.
> > > - No developers use GCC 4.1.2 regularly (or they would have found the
> build failing for the past 5 months)
> > > - Maintaining GCC 4.1.2 compatibility will only get harder, and the
> hacks thrown in to cut out the pieces that don???t work with it make the
> code more complex
> > >
> > > In my opinion, the biggest strike against supporting GCC 4.1.2 is that
> since no developer uses it, features and code that break compatibility
> likely won???t be found until months after the code was introduced, and
> nobody really knows which features are supported and which ones aren???t.
> > >
> > > At some point compatibility will simply have to be dropped. Should it
> be now, when the code will be a bit easier to simplify? Or do we wait
> until the workarounds become too hard? (And perhaps most importantly --
> does anybody still rely on this for their work?)
> > >
> > > Thoughts?
>
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>
--
_______________________________________________
Brent P. Krueger.....................phone: 616 395 7629
Professor................................fax: 616 395 7118
Hope College..........................Schaap Hall 2120
Department of Chemistry
Holland, MI 49423
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Received on Wed Mar 11 2015 - 05:00:02 PDT
