getting & building Timian

This section is a short and concise description of how to retrieve and build Timian from source. Timian consists of a few C++ modules, primarily to implement a shell for using the Xalan XSLT transformer, and for providing a couple of XSLT extension functions.

summary

Timian uses GNU autoconf, which should help building Timian on a wide variety of platforms. If you are on a supported platform, you should have Timian up and running in no time at all.

platform support

Currently, Timian is supported on Linux/i386 and Linux/S390, both of which I will be personally supporting. I sincerely hope to add much more varied platform support, but obviously depend on help from the user community to be forthcoming.

adding a new platform?

If you are building Timian for a not fully supported platform or configuration, please let me know. (especially if you can help update the autoconf setup).

download

Timian is currently only available as a source download. Go to the download page for further information.

I may be providing a set of binary downloads a later point. If you have built or are building either RPMs or <debian packages>, I would be delighted to provide those for download here as well as incorporate the builds into the overall configuration.

prerequisites

There are a few things you may need to have installed in order to build Timian:

analog

In order to build Timian with i18n support, you need to have analog installed. Not necessarily a version that supports OUTPUT XML, although I suspect you're likely to have that installed anyway.

Note: if you build Timian using analogs i18n support, you need to be aware that you're doing so subject to the analog licensing terms as laid out by Stephen Turner.

perl

Undoubtedly you have perl installed already, but Timian uses a couple of modules that you may not necessarily have installed.

• Unicode::Map
• Unicode::String

The availability of those modules will be checked at configuration time. To download you can find them both here: www.cpan.org

libgd

"libgd" supplies the PNG graphics functions for building piecharts. libgd can be found at www.boutell.com, and can be installed with minimum effort.

If you don't already have libgd installed, and you intend to build it from source, you will need a couple of other libraries:

• libz - see the zlib site.
• libpng - see the libpng site

And possibly others too depending on your configuration and requirements - zlib and libpng is the minimum required for Timian.
Note: you will need at least libgd version 2.0.8 - earlier versions did not have all of the required functionality.

configuration

If you're already familiar with GNU autoconf, none of this will come as a surprise.

./configure

Timian configuration is straight forward. There are two options you will need to think about:

--prefix
Specifies where to install timian once it is built. Type ./configure --help for an explanation. Also refer to the Timian directories section for an in-depth explanation of "what goes where".

--with-analogdir = <dir>|no
Specify the analog source directory or 'no'. Specifying 'no' means you do not want to use analogs i18n files to internationalise Timian output. Generally this would imply that you either don't... [tbc]

--with-locale = <locale>
Specify the default locale for Timian to use. If not specified, Timian will use "en_GB".

installation

For the time being, a "make install" is not supported; you will need to manually install Timian. It is not overly complicated, but clearly it is not optimal.

steps

Xalan and Xerces

Timian is based XalanC 1.5, which at the time of writing was not yet publicly released, but available as a CVS snapshot. XalanC-1.5.0-rc1 (Release Candidate 1) was recently released though. (by the time you're reading this, it is quite likely that XalanC 1.5 will have been released).

The embedded XalanC and XercesC are both based on a CVS snapshots from the Xalan CVS and Xerces CVS respectively. As and when necessary Timian will be updated with the latest versions, which will be reflected primarily as an increment in the Timian revision number.

using your own xalan and/or xerces

I only provide copies of xalanc and xercesc as a convenience; if you already have appropriate versions of both libraries available on your system, you may of course use those instead.

For the time being though, the build configuration does not allow you to omit building the embedded versions, but that will be looked into later.

Last time this page was updated: Wednesday 21 May 2003 20:49