Re: added list of prereqs to README

[John Darrington]

Presumably your "trouble" was unavailability of prerequisite libraries?

There was a discussion on one of the GNU mailing lists a few months
ago.  I forget the details, but the concensus was that configure
scripts should arranged such that if *any* of the prerequisites are
not found by configure, then they should *all* be reported together,
on the first attempt to run ./configure.

I don't think we do this.  Perhaps we should.


On Mon, Apr 03, 2006 at 01:03:13PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     I installed the following in README after having considerable
     trouble building PSPP on a random machine.  Corrections or
     additions are welcome.
     
     --- README.~1.8.~  2006-03-04 11:22:27.000000000 -0800
     +++ README 2006-04-03 13:01:30.000000000 -0700
     @@ -6,6 +6,33 @@ PSPP development is ongoing. It already 
      SPSS's transformation language.  Its statistical procedure support is
      currently limited, but growing.
      
     +Instructions for installation are in INSTALL.  Before you install
     +PSPP, you will need to install certain prerequisites:
     +
     +    * An ANSI C compiler and tool chain.
     +
     +    * GNU make.  Other make programs will not work.
     +
     +    * The GNU Scientific Library (libgsl), version 1.6 or later,
     +      including libgslcblas included with GSL.
     +
     +    * Perl, version 5.005_03 or later.  (Perl is required during build
     +      but not after installation.)
     +
     +    * Optional: libncurses.  Without it, PSPP will assume it is
     +      running in an 80x25 terminal.
     +
     +    * Optional: libreadline and libhistory.  Without them, interactive
     +      command editing and history features will be disabled.
     +
     +    * Optional: libplot (from GNU plotutils).  Without it,
     +      graphing features will not work.  If you do not have it
     +      installed, you must run `configure' with --without-libplot.
     +
     +    * Optional: GTK+ version 2.6.0 or later, plus libglade 2.0 or
     +      later.  Without them, the GUI will not be built.  If you do have
     +      these installed, you must run `configure' with --without-gui.
     +
      For information on differences from previous versions, please see file
      NEWS.  Full documentation on PSPP's language can be found in the doc/
      directory.

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