[prog] Fortran portability on linux

[Shirrell]

I am new to the programming list but have lurked for some time on 
techtalk.  Just a
little background before stating the current problem:

P-STAT is a sizable package used often for market research.  It has been 
around since
1964 and to survive the many different operating systems and Fortran 
compilers that
were around in the 70's we designed our own preprocessor.   We still use 
this even
though the target machines of importance have dwindled to unix, linux, 
PC Windows.

By careful selection of link options and especially the -static option 
we have been able
to support linux users of many flavors with a single module compiled 
using g77 and
static linked under Red Hat.  Our most recent module is compiled under 
Red Hat 7.3
using g77 5.26 and linked statically.

A customer has now reported that the module does not run and that the 
problem seems
to be an incompatibility with glibc 2.3 .   With static linking that 
should not happen.  

The customer has now made a module from the source and reports:

1) Compiling under Red Hat Advanced Server 3 (Red Hat 9) is not readily feasible (details available upon request)

2) Compiling under Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 is feasible. He made a dynamic binary (more on that later) that seems to work on Red Hat Advanced Server 3 (presumably in backward compatibility mode). 
  
3) There is something about gethostbyname and getservbyname that force use of some dynamic libraries even if you specify static linking.

The details which we requested have not arrived.  The source that we 
sent had no direct calls to
either gethostby name or getservbyname.  Portability has been our middle 
name for many years and
it is distressing to think that we will no longer be truly portable to 
linux environments.  Any suggestions
or help would be greatly appreciated.

Shirrell Buhler
shirrell at pstat.com