gfortran, ncar and blockdata_test failures

[Jack Howarth]

    Has anyone looked at the blockdata_test suite that the NCL/NCAR
developers have posted...

http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Download/build_from_src.shtml#CompilersNeeded

I find on powerpc-apple-darwin9 that both gcc 4.2.2 and the current
gcc 4.3 snapshots fail this test. Specifically, for the main.good
test I get the correct output but the main.init test fails. This
may explain why I get errors with ncar built against gfortran.
The test of...

ncargex arex03

...for example produces an error of...

NCAR Graphics Fortran  Example <arex03>

  Copying arex03.f

Compiling and linking...
gfortran -O3 -o arex03 arex03.f -L/sw/lib -L/sw/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lncarg -lncarg_gks -lncarg_c -lXpm -lX11 -lXext

Executing <arex03>...
 GKS ERROR NUMBER -107 ISSUED FROM SUBROUTINE :


Metafile file is named arex03.ncgm.

...where no arex03.ncgm output file is created by the resulting arex03 binary.
Any chance that we might have some flag that would allow gfortran to build
a usable blockdata_test suite?
                Jack