Binaries

[Waldek Hebisch]

Concerning recent question about binares, let me remaind you that
we have installation instruction at:

http://fricas.sourceforge.net/doc/INSTALL-bin.txt

This instruction assumes that installation steps are done
manually, but if you create script doing the same steps
it should work. OTOH doing steps manually means that
there is immediate feedback and possibility for extra
checks. So if something goes wrong correction should be
easy. It is up to potential script authors to ensure
robustness (unfortunately scripts can do wrong in
strange ways).

Concerning GMP: FriCAS uses sbcl dynamic loader which in
turn uses system dynamic loader. Distributed binary
does not specify GMP path (only basename is given) which means
that FriCAS will find GMP only when GMP is available in
standard system directires (which depend on Linux distribution
in use).

Concerning creating binaries: I do this as sequence of
few steps, after build I run 'src/scripts/mkdist.sh'
and then use 'tar'. The most tricky part is choice
of system used as build host: if you use bleading edge
system binaries are likely to fail on anything sligthly
older. AFAIK currently distributed bianaries work both
on 15 years old Linux and various bleading edge testing
distributions. However, given zeal at breaking backwards
compatibility in some Linux distributions in the future we may
be forced to use different build host and limit compatibility
only to modern systems.

--
Waldek Hebisch