Installation instructions for Vaucanson

Date: 2005-01-15

Installation instructions for Vaucanson, a C++ generic library for weighted finite state machine. See also the file README.

Contents

Installation

To install Vaucanson on your system, type in the classical sequence at the command prompt:

./configure
make check
make install (as root)

Note that an installation is specific to the compiler used to install it. Indeed, the call to ./configure enables some workarounds and, consequently, users must compile with the same compiler to avoid compatibility problems.

Additional features

There is a Python interpreter in the package. It is disabled by default because its compilation takes several hours. If you have time to spare, use instead:

./configure --enable-vaucanswig

There is an XML I/O subsystem in the library. It is enabled by default, but requires a working installation of another software package called Xerces-C++. If you do not have this package, or if you do not want to use XML I/O in Vaucanson, you can use:

./configure --disable-xml

Tweaking compilation options

Use CXXFLAGS_DEBUG or CXXFLAGS_OPTIMIZE to pass debug or optimization flags, not CXXFLAGS. For example:

./configure CXXFLAGS_DEBUG='-fstack-check -fbounds-check -ggdb'

This is because Vaucanson tries to use some particular default flags with some specific compilers such as GCC or ICC. Using CXXFLAGS conflicts with those specific flags; CXXFLAGS_DEBUG and CXXFLAGS_OPTIMIZE override these default flags.

Requirements

Vaucanson was tested with the GNU C++ Compiler (GCC) version 3.[234], and should work with ICC 8.1. The code is written in respect to the ISO-IEC 14882 (ISO C++) standard to permit a higher portability in the future.

Moreover, high verbose mode of the testing suites uses the AT&T dot format to save automaton in a human readable file. Use Graphviz to visualize these .dot files.

If you want to use the XML I/O system, you will need the Apache Xerces-C++ library version 2.3 or above.

Licence

Vaucanson is released under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. See the file COPYING for details.