**************************************************************************
* *
* Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading *
* Copyright (C) 1990-2011, John Zaitseff *
* *
**************************************************************************
Star Traders is written in the C99 programming language and uses Autoconf
and Automake to handle compilation and installation. Assuming you have
the needed tools, all you should need to do is run the following commands
from the source directory:
./configure
make
make install
The first two commands may be run as an ordinary user; the last may need
to be done as the system administrator (root).
Prerequisites
=============
Star Traders requires the following components for successful compilation
and installation:
1. A working C compiler conforming to ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (also known as
C99). Any recent version of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is more
than adequate.
2. An operating system ideally conforming to ISO/IEC 9945-1:2001 (POSIX)
or to the X/Open Single Unix Specification v3 or later. In short, any
modern Unix or Unix-like system like Linux almost certainly qualifies.
In actual fact, Star Traders uses the GNU Portability Library, so many
older systems may also work without modification.
3. A working X/Open Curses-compatible library, such as NCurses.
4. Development libraries and header files for all of the above. On many
systems, these files are part of XXX-dev packages.
Installation
============
The installation of Star Traders can be broken down into three main steps:
configuration, compilation and the installation proper.
The first step is configuring the package for your compiler and operating
system environment. As Star Traders uses Autoconf and Automake, all you
need to do in most cases is run "./configure" from the top-level directory
of the Star Traders source tree. The configure script understands all of
the usual Autoconf options; these are explained in detail in the Autoconf
manual:
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Running-configure-Scripts
This version of the configure script understands the following additional
command line options:
--disable-assert Turn off all debugging assert() statements
--with-ncurses Force the use of NCurses over the system's Curses
library
--without-ncursesw Don't use the NCursesW library with wide-character
support
By default, configure uses "/usr/local" as the top-level (prefix) install
directory. You can change this by specifying "--prefix=DIR" to use DIR
instead. For example, you can use a directory in your own home directory
by specifying something like:
./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt/trader
You may also specify certain configuration and/or compilation variables on
the command line to override choices made by configure. For example, you
can specify the compiler flags to use by passing the CFLAGS variable:
./configure CFLAGS="-g -O2 -Wall"
The "configure" script has many other options. You may obtain a list of
these by running:
./configure --help
You can also run configure in a separate build-only directory tree. This
feature requires GNU Make and allows you to keep the source code tree from
being modified by the compilation process. To use this option, create a
separate build directory, then run configure. For example, if you placed
the Star Traders source code tree in $HOME/src/trader-7.0, you could run
something like:
mkdir /tmp/trader-build-7.0
cd /tmp/trader-build-7.0
$HOME/src/trader-7.0/configure
Once again, the Autoconf manual describes these options (and many others):
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Running-configure-Scripts
Once the package has been configured, you can type "make" to compile it,
then "make install" to install it. You can specify the following command
lines, amongst others:
make all
make install
make clean
make distclean
make uninstall
The command "make all" does the same thing as running "make" by itself:
compile the package source code into an executable.
Running "make install" copies the executable program and all associated
data and documentation files to those directories specified during
configuration. If any of these directories require system administrator
access privileges for writing, you will need to run "make install" as
system administrator (root).
If you like, you can specify the DESTDIR variable to copy all installation
files to a temporary location before installing them later. For example,
if the prefix directory is "/usr/local", typing:
make install DESTDIR=/tmp/trader-install
will copy the final program "trader" to /tmp/trader-install/usr/local/bin,
the manual page to /tmp/trader-install/usr/local/share/man/man6 and so on.
The "make clean" command will remove most build-generated files, such as
object files generated by the compiler, from the source code or build
directory. Running "make distclean" will do the same, but will remove the
Makefiles generated by configure as well. In other words, if you run
"make distclean", you will need to rerun "configure" if you would like to
recompile Star Traders at a later date.
Finally, "make uninstall" will remove the executable program "trader" and
associated data and documentation files from their final installation
location. This assumes, of course, that you have NOT run "make distclean"
to remove the Makefiles that know the path to which those files were
installed!
Subversion Repository
=====================
You can always download the latest version of Star Traders directly from
the Subversion repository on the ZAP Group server:
svn co http://svn.zap.org.au/svn/trader/unix/trunk/ trader
Released versions of Star Traders include all scripts and files needed for
installation. If you are checking out the source code from the Subversion
repository, however, you will need to update these files yourself. You
will need the following additional tools installed on your system to do
so:
1. Autoconf (http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/)
2. Automake (http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/)
3. GNU Portability Library (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/)
The GNU Portability Library may be installed by retrieving the latest
Gnulib source code from the Git repository:
git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/gnulib.git
Once you have these tools, change to the Star Traders source code tree and
type:
PATH=${PATH}:/path/to/gnulib-tool ./build-aux/bootstrap
where "/path/to/gnulib-tool" is, of course, the directory containing the
Gnulib "gnulib-tool" script. You should be ready to run "./configure &&
make && make install" now.