This is the Ringing Class Library, and this file contains some notes about installing and using the library.
The Ringing Class Library is a collection of C++ classes which represent the objects studied in English change ringing. These include rows, changes, methods and method libraries. The project's home page can be found at http://ringing-lib.sourceforge.net/ where there is also information about how you can contribute, report bugs, and get at discussion forums.
The Ringing Class Library can optionally be built to use the Xerces XML
library to support XML method libraries. This can be controlled by the
--with-xerces (or --without-xerces) options to ./configure. The gsiril
program that is supplied with the library can be compiled with GNU readline
to support better command line editing. The --with-readline option controls
this. When no explicit option is given to ./configure, it attempts to
locate the libraries and will use them if they can be found.
To use Xerces from Microsoft Visual Studio, edit the ringing/common-msvc.h
header to define RINGING_USE_XERCES to 1, and manually add xerces to the
list of libraries and headers required. (This is done via Settings on the
Project menu. In the C/C++ tab, choose "Preprocessor" in the Category
selector and add the include directory to "Additional include directories".
Then in the Link tab, add Xerces's .lib file to "Object/library modules".
Use of readline from Microsoft Visual Studio is untested.
If you are compiling on Debian Linux, we recommend having the autoconf', libgdome2-dev' and `libreadline-dev' packages installed.
If you have a Unix-like system, you should be able to type ./configure to
configure the package. If you do not yet have a configure script, you'll
need to run autoreconf -i, which will run aclocal, libtoolize,
automake and autoconf to create one. The configure script will look at
whether your C++ compiler supports various language features such as
namespaces and exceptions. The results of these tests are put into the file
ringing/common-am.h as macro definitions. It is possible that you will want
to edit this file by hand to change the default behaviour of the class
library. You can then type make to compile the package, and make install
to install it.
If you are using Windows with a compiler other than Microsoft Visual Studio,
or any other system on which ./configure does not work, you should copy the
file ringing/common-am.h.in to ringing/common-am.h and edit it to indicate
how your C++ compiler behaves and where your standard header files are to be
found. The comments in that file explain which parts need to be customised.
After customisation, you should be able to compile all the files in the
ringing/ directory into a library. You should then install all the header
files in that directory to somewhere where your C++ compiler will find them
(as #include <ringing/row.h> etc.)
The documentation describing how to use the library is in the doc/ sub-
directory. If you don't have the software necessary to build the Texinfo
documentation, you can download it separately in various formats from the
project web page (see above).
It is hoped that the class library will compile on any modern C++ compiler. However, at present the code is generally only tested using the latest version of GCC.