PREREQUISITES
=============
GiNaC requires the CLN library by Bruno Haible installed on your system.
It is available from .
You will also need a decent C++ compiler (ISO C++-11 or higher). We recommend
the C++ compiler from the GNU compiler collection or the one from the LLVM
project. If you have a different compiler, you are on your own. Note that you
may have to use the same compiler you compiled CLN with for compatibility.
The pkgconf utility is required for configuration: .
Alternatively, pkg-config works as well.
To build the GiNaC tutorial and reference manual, the doxygen utility
(it can be downloaded from ) and TeX are necessary.
If you install from git, you also need GNU autoconf (>=2.59), automake (>=1.8),
libtool (>= 1.5), python (version 2.7 or 3.x), bison (>= 2.3), flex (>= 2.5.33)
to be installed.
INSTALLATION
============
To install from an unpacked 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 to build the library depends to a large degree on optimization levels.
Using the default high optimization, 'make' takes a few minutes on a fast
machine and 'make check' takes some more minutes. You can speed this up with a
parallel build with 'make -j2' or higher, depending on the number of available
CPU cores.
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:
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-1.2.2, 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 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.