Hello, On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 12:19:04AM -0700, Richard Haney wrote:
It's nice that the INSTALL document now gives at least _some_ "warning" about extra software that will be needed for the build, namely: "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."
But that is all the documentation says about these packages.
But it also seems that this information, besides being rather scant, The INSTALL file is [supposed to be] installation manual, so only details which are really important to get started are given. Since doxygen is necessary to build *developer* refernce, I don't think the INSTALL file is correct place to give more information on this subject. And those who really interested can just follow the link.
may also be a bit misleading. Could you please be more specific? What is exactly misleading?
I am interested in building the html and pdf documentation for GiNaC. If you don't have working TeX installation, you'd better donwload PDFs from GiNaC site. That would save you a *lot* of traffic and time.
A search through the configure output and the config.log output of ginac-1.3.4 suggests that configure does not look for any TeX executable or library as such,
I'm sorry to confuse you, but it *does* look for TeX executable[s].
but instead looks for doxygen, latex, and pdflatex, but no details are given there as to what configure specifically is looking for. It looks for doxygen, latex and pdflatex executables in your $PATH (surprise?).
To my knowledge, LaTex is a control ("macro" ?) package for TeX -- actually a substantial family of packages, one of which needs to be chosen, but conceivably it could be also have now evolved (with name in lower case) into a "stand-alone" executable, which is what the configure script seems to be looking for. Your information is completely correct. latex is simply another name for TeX executable. Basically, tex preloads tex preloads LaTeX core macro[s] when invoked as latex. latex (executable file, or symlink, or whatever it is) is typically a part of TeX installation.
I also recall that TeX packages are quite varied and can be quite huge and thus likely to be much more than is needed here. Can anyone suggest an appropriate TeX package if that is what's needed? Similar considerations apply for LaTeX as well, if that is what's needed.
Also, even though the .info documentation says "Perl is needed by the built process as well, since some of the source files are automatically generated by Perl scripts.", a case-insensitive grep of "C:/gnu/ginac-1.3.5" reveals that "perl" appears only in a few comment lines and thus seems to be irrelevant to "ginac-1.3.5".
Can someone provide some clarification as to what is needed here? The short answer is: casual user don't need Perl to build GiNaC from
I haven't tried to build documentation on ReactOS [yet]. On Linux (and other *NIXes) it used to build with tetex (see http://www.tug.org/tetex). No extra packages seems to be necessary. I'm sorry for a sloppy answer -- I'm not a TeXnician. the tarball. The complete answer follows, but if you are not interested in extending/modifying GiNaC you can skip it. function.h and function.cpp are created with the Perl script function.pl. In these files there a lot of constructors of GiNaC::function are declared/implemented. These constructors allow one to create GiNaC::function object from one ex, two ex'es, ..., 14 ex'es. If someone need constructors which take even more arguments, it is possible to modify $maxargs in function.pl rebuild GiNaC. New versions of function.h and function.cpp. will be automagically created/compiled/installed. That said, I don't think anyone uses this option (IMHO function which take more than 5 -- 7 arguments is ill-designed). Best regards, Alexei. -- All science is either physics or stamp collecting.