Bob

BOB - an automatic installation/compilation tool for GAP and its packages

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GAP source installer BOB

BOB IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED!!! Please see the GAP website for downloads and installation instructions.

What is BOB?

This program downloads, extracts, compiles and configures GAP 4.7 on your machine. BOB is written in C++ and comes as a precompiled binary for your operating system and architecture (see table below).

It has builtin support for downloading and extracting archives and it uses the C-compiler, development tools and libraries on your system to compile GAP and its packages. BOB will first check whether everything it needs from your system is installed and if not it will warn you and tell you what is needed. In the end, a status report and some log files will be produced such that you can easily see whether or not everything went well.

How to use BOB?

First you might want to look at Section Installing the prerequisites below. There are installation instructions for the prerequisites, depending on your operating system. However, you can also ignore this for now and just move on.

Simply download the archive for your operating system and architecture from the table below. For some combinations there is an alternative binary available, try this if the first one fails to execute. Currently, we support BOB for machines with Intel/AMD processors running Linux or Mac OS X, both on 64-bit (architecture "x86_64") and 32-bit (architecture "i686"). If you are in doubt about your machine, try uname -a or gcc -v and look for "Linux", "Darwin", "x86_64", "i686" or "i386".

On Linux, copy the executable to an empty directory on a filesystem with at least 1,8GB of free space and run the executable. On Mac OS X click on the Applescript application and choose such a directory. The path name of the directory must not contain spaces.

In either case, if any important tool is missing you get an immediate diagnosis and hints on how to fix the problems. If all necessary tools are there, after 10-30 minutes (depending on the speed of your internet connection, hard disk and computer), you will see a status report about the installation process and hopefully have a fully functional GAP 4.7 in the gap4r7 directory of the current directory. Additionally, you have a few startup scripts to start GAP in the current directory. You can copy them to an arbitrary place in your PATH to complete the installation. If you want, you can remove the directory "bobdownloads" to save disk space, it is not needed after the installation.

Motivation

Compiling GAP with all its packages has become more difficult over time. This is, first of all, because there are a lot more packages. Secondly, the libraries and programs on your system that GAP needs have become more numerous. Thirdly, the number of different combinations of operating systems and C-compilers is quite high and some require special attention. Last but not least, the question of 32-bit or 64-bit word size poses further difficulties. This all makes a pure source distribution of GAP rather user unfriendly.

On the other hand, providing precompiled binaries for the various variants of Linux and Mac OS X is not really feasible. Although this would be the best way from a user's perspective, the GAP group would probably be struggling to realise this.

This program BOB tries to make a compromise between these two approaches by offering convenience for the user whilst still working with a source distribution.

Advantages of this way to install GAP:

  • Hassle free full installation of GAP 4.7.
  • Nearly all packages compiled for which this is necessary.
  • Dynamic linking against libraries on your system.
  • Good and quick reports about missing prerequisites.
  • Hints to fix missing prerequisites.

Disadvantages of this way to install GAP:

  • Takes some time, depending on the speed of your internet connection, hard disk and computer.
  • Limited choice of special compilers and compilation flags.
  • Limited choice of special compilation options for GAP.

Download binary:

Operating System Architecture Link to binary
Linux x86\_64 (64-bit) bob-linux-64bit.tar.gz
Mac OS X Intel bob-osx.tar.gz

If you want to build BOB from source, just clone the repository and have a go. However, I do not intend to give support for this. For me, it is enough to be able to build BOB myself on Linux and Mac OS X.

Installing the prerequisites

Here we present simple commands to install all required software to compile GAP on a machine running x86_64 Linux or Mac OS X:

For debian-based Linux, do as root (or using sudo):

  # apt-get install gcc make m4 libc6-dev libreadline-dev \
                       lib32readline5-dev libncurses-dev lib32ncurses5-dev 
                       mawk wget libx11-dev libxt-dev libxaw7-dev

On a 64bit-machine you probably also want to do:

  # apt-get install g++-multilib gcc-multilib

For rpm-based Linux with yum, do as root (or using sudo):

  # yum install gcc make m4 glibc-devel readline-devel \
               libc-devel.i686 readline-devel.i686 ncurses-devel \
                n glibc-devel.i686 readline-devel.i686 ncurses-devel \
                ncurses-devel.i686 mawk wget \
                libX11-devel libXaw-devel libXmu-devel libXt-devel \
                libXext-devel libSM-devel libICE-devel

For Mac OS X using MacPorts:

If you haven't installed the Apple Developer Tools (aka "Xcode") yet (i.e., if your boot disk does not have a folder "Developer"), you must install them before running BOB (see here for instructions). Note that if you are on Mac OS X 10.7 or later, then after downloading and installing Xcode, you need to perform one extra step: launch Xcode, then open its Preferences dialog, and go to the "Downloads" pane. You will be presented with an optional list of extra components. From there, install the "Command Line tools" component. For Mac OS X 10.6 or earlier, some (possibly already outdated) version of Xcode may be contained on your Mac OS X Installer DVD.

Then you have to install MacPorts (see this page). Finally you can do:

  % sudo port install readline +universal ncurses +universal gawk wget xorg-libX11 xorg-libXaw

to install the required additional libraries and tools.

For Mac OS X using Fink:

If you haven't installed the Apple Developer Tools (aka "Xcode") yet (i.e., if your boot disk does not have a folder "Developer"), you must install them before running BOB (see here for instructions). Note that if you are on Mac OS X 10.7 or later, then after downloading and installing Xcode, you need to perform one extra step: launch Xcode, then open its Preferences dialog, and go to the "Downloads" pane. You will be presented with an optional list of extra components. From there, install the "Command Line tools" component. For Mac OS X 10.6 or earlier, some (possibly already outdated) version of Xcode may be contained on your Mac OS X Installer DVD.

Then you have to install Fink (see this page). We recommend to do a 64bit-only install. Finally you can do:

  % fink install readline6 libncurses5 gawk wget x11-dev

to install the required additional libraries and tools. Note that this does not install 32bit-libraries and so the 32-bit compile of GAP will not be fully functional.

Please submit any questions, comments or bug reports using BOB issue tracker.