[ADMB Users] Problem with ADMB-IDE

[Arni Magnusson]

As a regular user of Rtools and Sweave, and a collector of historical GCC 
and Borland compilers, as well as historical versions of ADMB, my approach 
is to "mess with the environment variables". This is on Windows XP.

My default PATH includes only one C++ compiler, the current GCC, which is 
now 4.5.0 (http://admb-project.org/community/related-software/gcc). Note 
that my default PATH does not include ADMB, because I want a stripped-down 
PATH when I use ADMB. As reported by Gary Nelson, Paul Conn, and others, a 
full-fledged PATH can cause compilers to conflict with each other.

Before compiling an ADMB model, I need to switch to GCC 4.4.0, and put the 
corresponding ADMB in the PATH. I use two alternative ways to do this:

*** Option 1 *** Open a Dos shell and type gcc440. This runs a script 
called gcc440.bat (stored in a good place) that contains five lines of Dos 
code:

   @echo off
   set ADMB_HOME=c:/admb/gcc440
   set PATH=c:/gnu/gcc440/bin;c:/admb/gcc440/bin
   echo ADMB_HOME=%admb_home%
   PATH

Note the minimalistic PATH. This particular Dos shell is now ready to run 
tpl2cpp, adcompile, adlink, and admb. These environment variable settings 
only apply to this particular Dos shell, until I close it.

*** Option 2 *** Open a TPL file in Emacs (double click in Windows 
Explorer, or type simple.tpl in a Dos shell, or open within Emacs). This 
switches Emacs to ADMB Mode, and in my .emacs I have defined:

   (setq admb-init "gcc440 & ")

The idea behind `admb-init' is to allow users to switch between ADMB 
versions within a session, or just to make special configurations work. 
ADMB Mode (and therefore ADMB-IDE) prepends this `admb-init' string in 
front of all ADMB compilation commands. So my Emacs runs gcc440.bat 
locally before calling tpl2cpp and friends. I generally don't think about 
this, just open simple.tpl and compile.

---

This somewhat elaborate setup (but easy to use) would not be necessary if 
I used only GCC 4.4.0 and the corresponding ADMB. I've used this setup for 
many years and it requires very little maintenance when new versions of 
compilers and ADMB come out. In other words, I have Dos scripts called 
bcc52, bcc55, gcc295, gcc345, etc.

In Linux, I have only one version of GCC (whatever the good GNU provides) 
and one version of ADMB (something that nearly matches the GCC version). 
And of course dog food for special occasions.

Arni



On Thu, 16 Sep 2010, Paul Conn wrote:

> Nice find.  I was having the same problem with ADMB-IDE a few months ago 
> but never found the reason for the error (I also have Rtools\mingw\bin 
> in my system path so suspect it was the issue) - after messing with it 
> for a few hours my solution was to give up and go back to my old text 
> editor and the Borland compiler.  Does anyone know if there's a 
> reasonable workaround for gcc, or should regular users of Rtools, 
> Sweave, etc. stick with the Borland compiler to prevent having to 
> continuously mess with environment variables?
>
> Paul
>
>
>
> Nelson, Gary (FWE) wrote:

>> The issue was a conflict between a mingw32 version used in the Rtools. 
>> The system path has c:\Rtools\mingw\bin, so I guess it took precedence. 
>> I removed the path and now ADMB-IDE works.
>>
>> Thanks for your help.
>>
>> Gary.
>