VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 08 2007 - 07:24:35 CST

Olaf,
  1) You MUST increase the plugin major or minor version number in order
     to get VMD to replace a plugin with a newer version. If you don't,
     VMD will simply ignore it and use the existing version and/or the
     versions that may be statically linked in.

  2) Using exceptions, templates and other advanced C++ features that
     are known to be ABI-incompatible between different compilers
     and even between different compiler versions will get you into
     trouble, and these things should be avoided where possible for
     exactly the kinds of reasons you state. It's annoying, but not
     nearly so annoying as fixing the resultant problems on various
     platforms.

I don't have time now, but I can explain more of this when I get
back from traveling.

  John

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 09:31:42AM +0100, Olaf Lenz wrote:
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> Hi!
>
> As a developer of molfile reader plugins, I noticed two things, that
> make the task a bit tedious:
>
> 1. One problem occurs when I want to enhance a plugin that is already
> part of VMD (like, for example, to improve the vtf plugin). I have tried
> in various ways, but I was not able to load new version of the plugin
> into VMD. I even tried to delete the dynamical plugin from
> $VMDDIR/lib/..., but to no avail. Apparently, the "core" plugins are
> linked statically into the VMD code. Is that right? Or what did I do wrong?
>
> 2. When I compile a C++-based plugin that uses exceptions, and I am
> using GCC 4 to compile it, the plugin is not compatible with the
> downloaded VMD binary version, which was apparently compiled with GCC 3.
> This is caused by a change of the ABI of exceptions between GCC 3 and 4
> (I think, the change might also have happened somewhere before).
> As compiling VMD manually is not really trivial, this actually makes it
> relatively hard to develop such plugins.
> Does anybody have a good idea or even know how to solve this problem?
>
> Best regards
> Olaf
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-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078