PREREQUISITES
=============

GiNaC requires the CLN library by Bruno Haible installed on your system.
It is available from <ftp://ftpthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/pub/gnu/>.

You will also need a decent ANSI-compliant C++-compiler. We recommend the
C++ compiler from the GNU compiler collection, GCC >= 3.4. If you have a
different or older compiler you are on your own. Note that you may have to
use the same compiler you compiled CLN with because of differing
name-mangling schemes.

The pkg-config utility is required for configuration, it can be downloaded
from <http://pkg-config.freedesktop.org/>.

To build the GiNaC tutorial and reference manual the doxygen utility
(it can be downloaded from http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen) and
TeX are necessary.

Known to work with:
 - Linux on x86 and x86_64 using GCC 3.4, 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2.
 - Linux on Alpha using GCC 3.4.
 - Solaris on Sparc using GCC 3.4.
 - Windows on x86 using GCC 3.4 (MinGW)

Known not to work with:
 - GCC 4.3.0 due to the compiler bug,
   see <http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=35548>.
 - GCC 2.96 or earlier because proper exception and standard library support
   is missing there.

If you install from git, you also need GNU autoconf (>=2.59), automake (>=1.7),
libtool (>= 1.5), bison (>= 2.3), flex (>= 2.5.33) to be installed.


INSTALLATION
============

To install from a source .tar.bz2 distribution:

 $ ./configure
 $ make
 [become root if necessary]
 # make install

To build the GiNaC tutorial and reference manual in HTML, DVI, PostScript,
or PDF formats, use one of

 $ make html
 $ make dvi
 $ make ps
 $ make pdf

To compile and run GiNaC's test and benchmark suite and check whether the
library works correctly you can use

 $ make check

The "configure" script can be given a number of options to enable and
disable various features. For a complete list, type:

 $ ./configure --help

A few of the more important ones:

 --prefix=PREFIX        install architecture-independent files in PREFIX
                        [defaults to /usr/local]
 --exec-prefix=EPREFIX  install architecture-dependent files in EPREFIX
                        [defaults to the value given to --prefix]
 --disable-shared       suppress the creation of a shared version of libginac
 --disable-static       suppress the creation of a static version of libginac

More detailed installation instructions can be found in the documentation,
in the doc/ directory.

The time the "make" step takes depends heavily on optimization levels. Large
amounts of memory (>128MB) will be required by the compiler, also depending
on optimization. To give you a rough idea of what you have to expect the
following table may be helpful. It was measured on an Athlon/800MHz with
"enough" memory:

step          | GCC optimization  | comment
              |   -O1   |   -O2   |
--------------+---------+---------+----------------------------------------
make          |   ~6m   |   ~8m   | shared and static library
make check    |   ~8m   |  ~12m   | largely due to compilation


To install from git 
===================

First, download the code:
 $ git clone git://www.ginac.de/ginac.git ginac
 $ cd ginac

Secondly, make sure all required software is installed. This is *really*
important step. If some package is missing, the `configure' script might
be misgenerated, see e.g. this discussion:
<http://www.ginac.de/pipermail/ginac-list/2007-November/001263.html>

Finally, run

 $ autoreconf -i

to generate the `configure' script, and proceed in a standard way, i.e.

 $ ./configure
 $ make
 [become root if necessary]
 # make install

COMMON PROBLEMS
===============

Problems with CLN
-----------------

You should use at least CLN-1.1, since during the development of GiNaC
various bugs have been discovered and fixed in earlier versions. Please
install CLN properly on your system before continuing with GiNaC.

Problems building ginsh
-----------------------

The GiNaC interactive shell, ginsh, makes use of GNU readline to provide 
command line editing and history. If readline library and/or headers are
missing on your system, the configure script will issue a warning. In this
case you have two options:

1) (the easiest) If you don't intend to use ginsh (i.e. if you need GiNaC
library to compile some piece of software), ignore it. ginsh builds just
fine without readline (obviously, it won't support the command line history
and editing).

2) Install GNU readline and run the configure script once again. Depending on
what your system/distribution is, you will have to install a package called
libreadline and libreadline-dev (or readline-devel). If your system's vendor
doesn't supply such packages, go to <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/> and
compile it yourself. Note that non-GNU versions of libreadline (in particular
one shipped with Mac OS X) are not supported at the moment.

Problems with missing standard header files
-------------------------------------------

Building GiNaC requires many standard header files. If you get a configure
error complaining about such missing files your compiler and library are
probably not up to date enough and it's no worth continuing.