Building Public Domain Software

The currently installed software, versions and where we got them from is documented in the following table. We need to make this a real HTML table and then upgrade the version numbers to the currentl versions.

All the GNU software is obtained from prep.ai.mit.edu.

Most of the software we download is the Tarred and Compressed format. The compression could be older .Z (Lempel-Ziv) or the .gz (Gnu Zip) format. We have GNU tar installed on all platforms that can read these compressed files directly. First we look at the table of contents of the distribution and make sure that the distribution gets unpacked into it's own directory. If not we create a subdirectory and move there before issuing the unpacking commands. For example to expand the emacs distribution we can use the following commands depending on the compression type.

/local/bin/tar -ztf emacs.tar.gz
/local/bin/tar -zxvf emacs.tar.gz
/local/bin/tar -Zxvf emacs.tar.Z

Sometimes you may not have access to the latest gcc. You can force the config to use the system C compiler (cc), or any other environment variable by doing the following.

$ setenv CC cc 
$ ./configure

Make sure any manual pages are installed. On some X applications, this involves issuing a specail make install-man command. Again on new software installations, the windex file which holds the pointers to all the man pages need to be updated on the Sun Solaris machines. The command to accomplish this is

catman -w -M /usr/local/man

After the software is installed on all our supported platforms, we pack it up with the following command tar -zcvf file.tar.gz file and move it to the /newton/tmp1/src/ftp/pub area on newton. Make sure to delete any older versions of the software we may have lying around in the ftp area. This area is available for anonymous ftp or through the web. Several departments on campus get stuff from here.