Building WeiDU

Requirements and build environment

The version of OCaml needs to be greater than or equal to 4.04 and less than or equal to 4.11, and configured without forced safe strings.

GNU/Linux

OCaml with native compilers.
A basic GCC tool chain with make.
Perl, which is normally installed by default.
Optionally, also git, hevea, texlive, zip and upx. HeVeA and TexLive are only needed to build the documentation and zip and upx are used in making the distributable archives (upx is optional).
Elkhound (vide infra). Place the executable on you path and allow Elkhound to be executed as a program, for example, by using the terminal command chmod +x path/to/elkhound

Windows

Native OCaml (typically compiled by MinGW), obtained from ocaml.org.
A Cygwin-based *nix tool chain, particularly binutils and make from the Devel group. Perl is also required but is typically installed by default. Optionally also git (Devel), openssh (Net), zip (Archive) and upx (Utils).
Cygwin-hosted MinGW-GCC, called mingw-gcc-core, or some such.
Elkhound (vide infra). For less configuration, place the elkhound binary in Cygwin's /bin directory, or equivalent. The build process does not like paths with spaces.

MacOS

Make sure you have Xcode installed. You probably don't need Xcode per se but apparently it is the conventional way of obtaining some of the necessary programs (make, gcc, etc.). You may be able to download and install Xcode's command-line tools from Apple Developer without having to download and install all of Xcode.
Install MacPorts or HomeBrew.
Install Perl (using MacPorts or HomeBrew, for example).
Use MacPorts or HomeBrew to install OCaml. Note where OCaml was installed.
Optionally, install UPX. UPX is used to compress the compiled programs, but is not available for all platforms.
Obtain Elkhound (vide infra) and place the executable on your path. Allow Elkhound to be executed as a program, for example, by using the terminal command chmod +x path/to/elkhound

Elkhound

The source code and build instructions for Elkhound are available at GitHub. There are also compiled executables for some platforms available under Releases.

Compiling WeiDU

First time compiling

Obtain WeiDU's source code. The recommended way is by using git: git clone git://github.com/WeiDUorg/weidu.git your/directory Bear in mind WeiDU builds distribution packages to the directory one level up from where the source is located.
Enter the directory where you put WeiDU's source code. Copy the file ./sample.Configuration to ./Configuration. Open the file and change the value for OCAMLDIR for your platform to the directory in which the OCaml binaries are located.

If you have compiled before

Make sure you have the up-to-date WeiDU source. The recommended way is by using git (from inside the directory where you keep your WeiDU source code): git pull origin
If the file ./sample.Configuration has been changed, recreate ./Configuration and re-apply any changes you have made to it.

Finally

Check out the branch from which you wish to compile WeiDU. If you are building a stable version, check out the master branch. If your are building a beta version, check out the devel branch. From inside your WeiDU source directory, you check out the branch with: git checkout branch, where branch is the branch you wish to check out.
Run make. Relevant build targets are

clean
weidu
weinstall
tolower
doc
windows_zip
linux_zip
osx_zip
src_zip

The *_zip targets produce an archive in .. that is suitable for distribution. If you are not developing WeiDU, you probably want one of windows_zip, linux_zip or osx_zip.

2k16daniel/weidu