The GAP 4 Development Manual

Administrating the GAP Project

2015

Abstract

In this development manual we collect documentation of various tasks needed for the further development, maintenance and distribution of GAP.

Some sections provide practical howto's and check lists for tasks like, e.g.: committing changes, testing, wrapping archives, compiling documentation.

Other sections document certain conventions which are followed by the active members of The GAP Group. Some examples: there are several mailing lists which are used for different purposes; there is a mechanism how larger changes to the GAP system should be announced and discussed among the developers before they are committed, called proposals; there is a concept of modules where parts of the GAP system are assigned to specified maintainers.

Most parts of this distribution, including the core part of the GAP system are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html or the LICENSE file in the root directory of the GAP installation.

More detailed information about copyright and licenses of parts of this distribution can be found in Reference: Copyright and License.

GAP is developed over a long time and has many authors and contributors. More detailed information can be found in Reference: Authors and Maintainers.

1 Structure of the GAP distribution

1.1 Kernel, library, documentation, package interface, development part

1.2 The directories of the GAP distribution and repository

2 The GAP kernel programming

2.1 Overview of the GAP kernel

2.2 "Hello World" example

2.3 Structure of the GAP kernel

2.4 Garbage collection in GAP

  2.4-1 GASMAN
  2.4-2 GASMAN Interface
  2.4-3 The GASMAN Interface for Weak Pointer Objects

2.5 Interfaces

2.6 Objects and API