This project aims to provide a framework for easily creating a precompiled binary release of GAP for Mac OS X, in the form of an .app package distributed inside a .dmg disk image. User should be able to install it via drag & drop, and start it by double clicking the .app bundle. Advanced users should be able to start GAP from a running terminal, too.
In addition, most (ideally, all) GAP packages shipped with GAP should work; that means that any C/C++ code they contain should be compiled, and required dependencies also be included in the bundle.
As a by product, the bundle actually contains fully working copies of some interactive mathematical software of independent interest, including
- Singular
- Pari
- Normaliz Thus, in a sense, this is not just a "GAP bundle", but rather a bundle of research grade computer algebra software.
Note that this project is still work in progress, not everything is working yet. Most notably, GAP itself and several GAP packages are not yet completely done.
Building this bundle requires that Apple's Xcode is installed, more specifically, the Xcode command line tools (i.e. the C/C++ compilers and assorted tools)
Xcode can be installed via the App store. You then still need to install the command line tools. On Mac OS X 10.9 and with Xcode 5.1, simply run
xcode-select --install
from the command line. If that fails, the following instructions may help:
- https://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.html#installing.xcode
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9329243
Clone this repository, go into the directory, and enter
make all
Then wait... this can take quite some time. It will download the
required source code (almost 300 MB), and then compile a lot of stuff.
The result is an .app bundle GAP.app which you can move around and
double click to start GAP.
To create a disk image for distribution to end users, enter
make dmg
The primary challenge to overcome is that most UNIX software is not
written with the possibility of binaries and shared libraries being
able to relocate. That said, a lot of software can be coaxed into
supporting that. The primary tool we use for this is the
fix_install_names.sh
script which in turn uses Apple's install_name_tool.
TODO: explain what fix_install_names.sh does
TODO: explain how the "packages" in subdirectories work, and how to add new packages
The Polymake project also has a similar effort, the polybundle.
Max Neunhöffer's Bob is a project that in a sense works dual to what we do: Instead of precompiling things, it downloads source code on the user's computer and attempts to compile everything there.
Please submit bug reports and feature requests via our GitHub issue tracker: