Installation guidelines

Distribution packages

Source code distribution packages are provided roughly once per month at Sourceforge. Those packages fall into four parts:

• The core C++ class library. This ought to compile in any environment with any contemporary C++ compiler. The Makefile and Makefile.conf assume a GNU make tool, and Makefile.conf works out of the box in the linux/gcc environment only. For the Windows/cygwin environment, it should suffice to set os = linux in Makefile.conf.
• A wrapper of the most library methods for the Tcl scripting language. A successful build ends up with a gosh shell tool. This requires that Tcl/Tk header files can be located by the compiler.
• The graphical user interface. Provided that the Tcl/Tk system installation is working properly, and the shell tool has been built, the GUI should start without errors. Some runtime errors might occur due to inappropriate Tcl installations of missing graphical filtering tools.
• GLPK source code, adapted to the GOBLIN linear programming interface. The included GLPK source code is not updated regularly. The build should run without problems.

Binaries are not distributed regularly. An MS Windows setup will be provided for every major build (2.7, 2.8, ...), roughly once every year. The latter is a condensed cygwin runtime environment including several packages required for GUI output to bitmap and vectorial file formats. The Windows setup is intended for non-experienced end users and for quick validation. To advanced end users and developers, a regular cygwin installation is recommended, since the cygwin condensation step does not take care of package management.

Unpacking the source code

Supposed, you want to install from a source code distribution package (say Release 2.8) on a UNIX machine, the first step to build the library, the shell and/or problem solvers is to unpack the goblin.2.8.tgz archive by typing

tar xfz goblin.2.8.tgz

This will extract to a goblin.2.8 directory right below the current working directory. If you also want to install the test code package (say goblin.2.8.test.tgz, do it from the same working directory.

Build from source code distributions in UNIX like environments

Change to the extracted goblin.2.8 root directory. If necessary, edit the Makefile.conf file (and changes are indeed necessary for platforms other than linux/gcc). Build the binaries by typing

make

This results in several libraries (copied to the the lib subfolder) and in the shell tool gosh (copied to the the bin subfolder).

You may test your personal installation by starting the ./goblet graph browser from the Makefile directory, and loading one of the test problems in the samples folder. If you have installed the test code, an automated test can be started from the GUI. This might turn out one of the known runtime problems.

In the testing environment, the GUI can only be started from the setup root directory!

If you get stuck with the shell tool build, but you only want to use the C++ API, type

make goblin

If you want to use a solver executable rather than the API, say the matching solver, then

make exe pr=optmatch

creates the executable optmatch. The complete list of executable solvers can be found in the folder main_src.

Core library build without the shipped Makefile

The core library is platform independent code. To built it without the shipped Makefile, just import all files from the lib_src and include directories and edit the configuration.h to get ridd off the code instrumentation utilized by the GUI. Details can be found in Section Compile time configuration .

Building this reference manual

You are just reading some version of the doxygen reference manual. A more recent html version might be online at the Sourceforge project homepage You can build the html reference from the source distribution root directory by typing

make html

In the output, the entry point for browsing the documentation is ./html/index.html.

There is also a latex manual which is build by the command

make latex

Preparing cygwin

Nothing is special with the GOBLIN build in the cygwin environment (just set os = linux in Makefile.conf. In order to have a full featured GUI, the following packages are required:

• xfig with fig2dev for processing vectorial graphing formats
• netpbm for processing bitmaps

These packages are also used in the linux environment, but the cygwin setup does not install them by default.

Potential GUI runtime problems

• init.tcl cannot be found: In occasion, this probably also happens when one of the shell tools tclsh, wish or gosh is started directly. The problem has been observed with cygwin installations, and can be fixed by brute copying the file where the tcl interpreter finds it.
• Tcl/Tk does not support multiple threads: This should be reported once after installation (updates). If you disable the application of threads, the GUI won't refresh the display as long as library functions are running. In particular, one cannot interrupt solvers. If you enable the GUI thread applications, it will sometimes crash. Unfortunately, Tcl/Tk is usually shipped without the tcl_platform(threaded) option. One can fix the problem either by re-compiling the Tcl library or by installing a special distribution from the net (for example at mK extensions project or the Active Tcl distribution). Download works fine for linux, but in the cygwin case the original problem is most likely replaced by the following bug:
• The GUI is confused by a wrong HOME environement variable: This happens when a windows Tcl libraray is used instead of a cygwin Tcl library. Resolve the problem by re-installation of the Tcl library.
• Cannot export to bitmaps or vectorial formats other than fig: Some graphing tool is missing. If vectorial formats such as eps can be generated, but gif cannot, something is wrong with the netpbm installation (the package used for bitmap manipulation). Otherwise, the fig2dev command line tool cannot be accessed. The latter tool is associated with the xfig vectorial drawing program (sharing the input file format), but not necessarily installed with xfig). Output to the fig format is possible in any case.

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