Vicare/SOFA ¶

The International Astronomical Union’s SOFA Collection consists of two libraries of routines, one coded in Fortran 77 the other in ANSI C. There is a suite of vector/matrix routines and various utilities that underpin the astronomy algorithms.

Back then, I repackaged the original distribution under the gnu Autotools; the result is ‘atsofa’. The work I did for this package is a true madness: I am really not interested in Astronomy. I had some steam to release…

Vicare’s code from ‘r6rs-sofa’ is now in a Vicare–only package: Vicare/SOFA.

Miscellaneous ¶

Once upon a time I started an extension: Vicare/Neon; it is an interface for the Neon C language library. The last time I checked, Neon was significantly underdocumented (according to my standards). I never got around to finish this package. I have decided to drop it. Work wasted. That is life.

I have a pretty decent (for me) interface to the GSASL package: Vicare/GSASL. GSASL appears to be abandonware in search of new maintainers. This saddens me, but there is nothing I can do: I know almost nothing of crypto stuff, authentication and the SASL mechanisms. Right now GSASL does not even compile on my system. It annoys me to waste Vicare/GSASL: I want this package to exist. I do not know what to do.

I have a pretty decent (for me) interface to the libESMTP C language library: Vicare/libESMTP. This library is, in practice, abandonware; but it works fine. It depends on GSASL, so while Vicare/GSASL is stalled, Vicare/libESMTP is stalled too. Darn!

Back then, I started a package to interface OpenSSL: Vicare/OpenSSL. I have put some significant effort in this package, but OpenSSL is so big that much more work is needed. Sooner or later I will come around and update this package to Vicare ‘0.4’; then I will decide what to do.

The are a couple of packages for which I started a project, but never got around to actually develop them: Vicare/GMIME, Vicare/Cairo. I will have to do something about them.

Industria is kicking me hard. This package has uncovered errors in Vicare: I have to whip myself into fixing them. But first I have to understand what is going on. Anyway, I have updated the package to Vicare ‘0.4’. The latest error happens when I compile the libraries running make:

*** Vicare: unhandled exception:
 Condition components:
   1. &compiler-internal-error
   2. &library: compiler
   3. &module: assemble-sources
   4. &who: xorl
   5. &message: "invalid instruction operands"
   6. &irritants: ((xorl 2264 %edi) 2264 %edi)

the Assembly instruction ‘xorl’ wants ‘%eax’ as second operand when the first operand is a 32-bit constant; for some reason this constraints is not enforced by the compiler, so ‘%edi’ is selected by the register allocator. I will have to research why.