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Getting Lasso

Lasso is licensed under the GNU General Public License. That means users are given several inalienable rights: the right to use the library, whatever the purpose is; the right to study how it works, getting access to source code; the right to distribute the library to others and the right to modify the library and publish those modifications.

Talks about library and how Lasso will force the use of the GPL.

Binary packages

Debian packages

The latest Lasso release should be available straight from any Debian mirror worldwide in the etch or sid distribution. Additionaly packages are provided for the sarge release on a dedicated APT repository. The following line needs to be added to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.entrouvert.org ./debian/lasso/

It is then a matter of running:

apt-get install liblasso-dev

RPM packages

RPM Bad. A mess.

Microsoft Windows packages

Ah. Isn't that funky ? (need to ask Romain about cygwin, mingw32 and whatever is needed to get Lasso working on Windows)

Sources

The source code of the latest release is available at the following URL: http://labs.libre-entreprise.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=31

Lasso uses the GNU automake and autoconf to handle system dependency checking. It is developed and built locally on GNU/Linux (Debian) both on x86 and PowerPC processors.

Compiling

./configure

The configure shell script attempts to guess correct values for various system-dependent variables used during compilation. It uses those values to create a Makefile in each directory of the package. It may also create one or more .h files containing system-dependent definitions. Finally, it creates a shell script config.status that can be run in the future to recreate the configuration, and a file config.log containing compiler output (useful mainly for debugging configure).

configure can take a lot of options, a complete list is available with the --help flag: ./configure --help

Installation Directories

By default, Lasso will be installed in /usr/local/lib. It is possible to specify an installation prefix other than /usr/local by giving the option --prefix=PATH; for example --prefix=/usr.

Optional Features

There are optional features that you may want not to build, things like unit tests, bindings for different languages, etc.

--disable-java Disable the Java binding
--disable-python Disable the Python binding
--disable-php Disable the PHP binding
--disable-csharp Disable the C# binding
--disable-tests Disable the unit tests

On the other hand there are features you may want to activate.

--enable-debugging Enable debugging messages
--enable-profiling Enable profiling compilation flags

Once ./configure has been executed it is time to compile the whole thing.

make

It should take a few minutes.

make install

Will then copy the library and header files to their final directories.

Bleeding Edge

CVS (Concurrent Versions System) is the version control system used by Lasso developers to keep track of files, how and by whom they were modified. It is accessible anonymously for people to use the latest developments.

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.labs.libre-entreprise.org:/cvsroot/lasso
cvs login     # press enter
cvs -z3 checkout lasso

Note

The CVS version requires more tools to build; notably automake, autoconf and libtool.