Evolving Software

These are my notes on the integration and streamlining of Horae, Demeter, libperlxray, and the Athena User's Guide. These notes cover installation of all these tools on a linux machine or some other kind of unix. (These instructions should also work on Windows for someone brave and knowledgeable enough to properly set up an adequate development environment. But don't expect me to know much about Windows development.) Eventually Carlo Segre will have debian packages for everything on this page. For people on debian based systems, those will probably prove easier to install that following the instructions on this page. Also eventually, I will generate Windows executables for my Windows users. Once this is all working, I intend to tag releases and upload tarballs to my web site and to SourceForge.

I assume that you already have Perl, Subversion, a C compiler (gcc, for instance), and a Fortran compiler (I recommend gfortran on a linux machine) installed on your computer. All these things should be available via your system's package manager.

Note that I have moved from ExtUtils::MakeMaker to Module::Build for my build system for most parts of my software. The semantics are very similar, but the details of the build incantations are somewhat different. This little chart compares the two sets of build commands:

Module::Build will be installed when you follow the instructions for installing the many pre-requisites needed by these packages.

The symbol is used to mark parts of this process that are awkward or broken.

Here are the steps in the order that you should perform them:

• Installing my software and its dependencies without root access

• Checking the codes out of SVN

• Install Ifeffit

• Install the libperlxray modules

• Install Horae

• Install Demeter

• Install the Athena User's Guide

• A note on the install_prereqs script