[ADMB Users] Interested in ADMB development?

[Arni Magnusson]

The line-ending discussion brings up the topic of user interest in 
development.

Immediately after responding to Saang-Yoon's question on 
users at admb-project.org, I also sent a message to 
developers at admb-project.org, starting a more technical discussion among 
developers on whether ADMB could be made more robust to line endings. Dave 
Fournier responded by submitting a fix that Johnoel then committed to the 
source repository.

Later, three ADMB users (Ian Taylor, Mike Prager, and Ben Bolker) 
continued the discussion of making ADMB more robust to line endings, after 
the fix had already been committed. What we've got here is a failure to 
communicate - but this can be improved.

Ian, Mike, and Ben are skilled developers (I use their software) and the 
last thing we want is to make such ADMB users feel left out of technical 
discussions regarding ADMB development.

Firstly, anyone can browse through the developers at admb-project.org 
archives at http://groups.google.com/group/admb-developers.

Secondly, those who want to listen "live" and be able to participate in 
technical discussions should send Anders Nielsen <anders at nielsensweb.org> 
an email to become a member of the developers at admb-project.org mailing 
list. This is a larger group than the development core team, and entails 
no responsibilities.

The three key people regarding ADMB development are Johnoel Ancheta 
(coordination and repository maintenance), John Sibert (final say on 
decisions), and Dave Fournier (original author and expert).

In the long term, we can expect user contributions to be a major factor in 
ADMB development. I encourage anyone to subscribe to 
developers at admb-project.org by sending Anders Nielsen 
<anders at nielsensweb.org> an email.

Arni



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 11:22:55 -1000
From: Johnoel Ancheta <johnoel at hawaii.edu>
To: davef at otter-rsch.com 
Cc: developers at admb-project.org
Subject: Re: ADMB in a Linux machine

Thanks Dave,

Merged the changes to tpl2cpp lex file and committed to the repository 
(revision 636). You can see the changes by updating.

admb-trunk$ svn update

Cheers,
Johnoel

----- Original Message -----
From: dave fournier <davef at otter-rsch.com>
Date: Thursday, May 20, 2010 11:13 am
Subject: Re: [Developers] ADMB in a Linux machine
To: Arni Magnusson <arnima at hafro.is>
Cc: developers at admb-project.org

> Hi,
>
> I modified the code to strip the ctrl M off the string. (See crtl M in 
> the comments). This is the lex source for tpl2cpp. myallc builds tpl2cpp 
> from it.
>
> Dave
>
>
>
> Arni Magnusson wrote:
>
>> It turns out that ADMB in Linux compiles and runs many models 
>> (including simple.tpl) regardless of line endings:
>>
>> $ unix2dos simple.tpl
>> $ admb simple
>> $ simple
>>
>> GCC, R, and most tools I work with can handle both line endings just 
>> fine, so I think it would be worthwhile to make ADMB robust to line 
>> endings.
>>
>> In Saang-Yoon's example (attached), it's enough to comment out the 
>> runtime section,
>>
>> // RUNTIME_SECTION
>> //   maximum_function_evaluations 10000
>>
>> and then the model compiles and runs. Otherwise, tpl2cpp mangles this 
>> specific line so mark_recap13.cpp becomes:
>>
>>   void model_parameters::set_runtime(void)
>>   {
>>     dvector temp1("{10000^M}");
>>     ...
>>
>> Note the ^M inside the string. Do you think this is an isolated bug in 
>> tpl2cpp that we can fix, to make ADMB as robust to line endings as GCC 
>> and related tools?
>>
>> Arni
>