Reproducibility of 'Poincaré dodecahedral space parameter estimates'

[broukema]

Original article: Roukema, B. F., Z. Buliński, and N. E. Gaudin, 2008, Poincaré dodecahedral space parameter estimates, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 492, 657 arXiv:0807.4260, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008A&A...492..657R

PDF URL: https://codeberg.org/boud/RBG08/raw/branch/master/Roukema_ReSciC2020.pdf
Metadata URL: https://codeberg.org/boud/RBG08/src/branch/master/metadata.yaml
Code URL: https://codeberg.org/boud/0807.4260 (and swh)

Scientific domain: Astronomy (Cosmology)
Programming language: C + Fortran 77
Suggested editor: Based on fortran + C + scientific field per the official profiles, @pdebuyl would seem to be the most appropriate

This is Paper number 12 at ReScience/ten-years#1.

[broukema]

After I receive a review (or reviews) on my submission, here are some post-submission thoughts that I could integrate into the text, if the reviewer(s) allowed me to make some changes:

(1) Here's a relevant comment from the Dept of Physics at the Uni of Oxford - https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/it-services/where-has-g77-gone-to

Part of the reason for the transition from g77 to gfortran is to make mixing-in with C code simpler,
and avoid (most of) the acts of cruel and unusual programming which were previously required to
get the compilers' outputs to co-operate. Inevitably, the results of said acts were almost inevitably
fragile and non-portable.

So part of the results of this paper can be reworded colourfully by stating that "acts of cruel and unusual programming" that seemed appropriate in 2008 are difficult to update in terms of the current (2020 Debian stable) software environment. In more formal terms, again quoting the same source, the necessary acts were "almost inevitably fragile and non-portable" - which indeed is the case here.

(2) Another useful observation is that although in principle it should have been possible to recompile g77 from source, in the same or a close enough way to which Debian stable did that in 2008, I have not been able to find g77 source code from mainstream sources for that epoch; I only found them for 1996-1998:

• Debian - https://wiki.debian.org/GfortranTransition - states that "g77 and g77-3.4 have been removed from the archive, meaning that any non-transitioned packages would FTBFS [fail to build from source]" , and a manual search on the archives of old packages is consistent with that: I couldn't find them in the debian archive, e.g. http://archive.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/

• The "GNU Fortran 77 (g77) Legacy Site" http://www.kilmnj.com/g77/ appears to be James Craig Burley's legacy site for g77, but "where to find the most current release of g77" points to https://gcc.gnu.org, where the only g77 source code I could find was a range of versions from a decade prior to RBG08, dated 1996-1998: https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/g77/ - from g77-0.5.18.tar.gz 1996-04-01 03:00 1.0M to g77-0.5.23.tar.gz 1998-05-20 03:00 1.4M.

[khinsen]

This sounds like a problem that Software Heritage could help with, but I don't know how to proceed, so I asked the question on Twitter.

[broukema]

@khinsen A side issue, which is in fact interesting for reproducibility, is that on Twitter you said "1995-1998", but the pre-0.5.18 files, from 1995, are only diff files:

| g77-0.5.8-0.5.9.diff.gz | 1995-02-21 03:00 | 16K |
| g77-0.5.9-0.5.10.diff.gz | 1995-02-22 03:00 | 3.9K |
| g77-0.5.10-0.5.11.diff.gz | 1995-02-23 03:00 | 5.0K |
| g77-0.5.11-0.5.12.diff.gz | 1995-02-23 03:00 | 1.6K |
| g77-0.5.12-0.5.13.diff.gz | 1995-02-25 03:00 | 10K |
| g77-0.5.14-0.5.15.diff.gz | 1995-05-19 03:00 | 12K |
| g77-0.5.15-0.5.16.diff.gz | 1995-08-30 03:00 | 168K |
| g77-0.5.16-0.5.17.diff.gz | 1995-11-19 03:00 | 36K |
| g77-0.5.17-0.5.18.diff.gz | 1996-04-01 03:00 | 436K |
| g77-0.5.18-0.5.19.diff.gz | 1996-12-15 03:00 | 94K |

Unless you have g77-0.5.8 with at most very tiny changes, the 1995 diff files only give clues to the full source code and in practical terms are close to useless. The person maintaining this at the time presumably wanted to minimise wasting bandwidth and disk space, and wanted to make it straightforward for someone updating to verify what was changing. It didn't occur to him/her that the source of g77-0.5.8 itself might be unavailable.

That's why I deliberately said "1996-1998". :) This doesn't change the curious difficulty in finding the 2007-2008-ish sources. Obviously, the most likely explanation is people being busy, wanting to move forward, and not thinking that long-term reproducibility might be important.

[khinsen]

@broukema Your explanation is probably correct, but I still find it surprising that a piece of software that once was widely used and part of a flourishing project (GCC) can disappear so easily.

[broukema]

@khinsen I fully agree that it's surprising. Even if someone eventually finds the sources, I think the as-far-as-we-know-disappearance of the g77 source would probably be worth adding to the abstract.

[broukema]

@jcburley Do you know of any g77 source tarballs for around the years 2006-2008 located on a reputable server? Would you be willing to put these online if you still have them available? Do you wish to comment publicly on the apparent disappearance of the sources? Scroll up for the context of the reproducibility of scientific research papers.

[jcburley]

@jcburley Do you know of any g77 source tarballs for around the years 2006-2008 located on a reputable server? Would you be willing to put these online if you still have them available? Do you wish to comment publicly on the apparent disappearance of the sources? Scroll up for the context of the reproducibility of scientific research papers.

g77 wouldn't have had separate, maintained tarballs in 2006-2008, as gfortran replaced it in the GCC distribution.

If you can find a GCC tarball prior to 4.0 (say, 3.x), that should include the g77 sources, which (IIRC) were shipped with GCC, but I can't remember (nor find info easily on) just which GCC version the first to incorporate g77 versus g77 being provided as a sort of add-on or plugin tarball.

In the late '90s, the EGCS project forked from GCC and later replaced GCC. During this time, I think g77 was included (rather than a separate tarball). So, that's another possible source for g77 source code: an EGCS tarball.

I left some information at http://www.kilmnj.com/, though that site is very, very old.

As for g77-0.5.8 or earlier tarballs, circa 1995 or prior, it is possible I might have them lying around on an old filesystem somewhere, but I doubt they'll be of much use. Let me know if you want me to do some spelunking in that regard.

I assume you've checked with the FSF and asked about their archives; if not, definitely do so. They used to keep lots of older versions of distributions on "Savannah", I think is/was the name of the system; possibly it, or whatever has replaced it, has older GCC/EGCS/g77 distributions on it.

Sorry I can't be of much more help!

[khinsen]

Thanks @jcburley, that was helpful. The GNU FTP server has gcc-3.4.6 which contains g77: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-3.4.6/

[broukema]

@jcburley Thanks! :) gcc-3.4.6 looks like exactly what is relevant in this particular case. So the only thing that was missing was user knowledge (by me, anyway) about the relations between g77, gcc and gfortran in terms of tarball archiving.

[broukema]

@pdebuyl @khinsen @oliviaguest @rougier I updated the paper to take into account the points above. As you can see briefly stated in the paper, I had a go at compiling g77-3.4.6 within gcc-3.4.6, without success. Even if it had succeeded, I'm not sure if it would have been worth it to continue in that direction.

Any chance of this submission being allocated a reviewer? My paper seems to be the only one lacking colourful tags :) - even the '01 Request' tag is missing...

[oliviaguest]

I'm not sure what's going on @broukema — @khinsen are you taking care of this? If so, I respect your judgment and will let you deal with this if not, please let me know how/if I can help.

[khinsen]

@oliviaguest I jumped into this thread because of the g77 discussion which is related to a problem I had to deal with myself a while ago. I was under the impression that a review was going on already, which apparently isn't the case! Sorry @broukema!