Appendix - Installation Guide for the UNIX Versions
Compiling PARI requires an ANSI C or a C++ compiler. If you do
not have one, we suggest that you obtain the gcc/g++ compiler. As for
all GNU software mentioned afterwards, you can find the most convenient site
to fetch gcc at the address
http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
(On Mac OS X, this is also provided in the Xcode tool
suite.) You can certainly compile PARI with a different compiler, but
the PARI kernel takes advantage of optimizations provided by gcc.
This results in at least 20% speedup on most architectures.
Optional packages. The following programs and libraries are useful
in conjunction with gp, but not mandatory. In any case, get them before
proceeding if you want the functionalities they provide. All of them are free.
* GNU MP library. This provides an alternative multiprecision
kernel, which is faster than PARI's native one, but unfortunately binary
incompatible. To enable detection of GMP, use Configure --with-gmp.
You should really do this if you only intend to use GP, and probably also if
you will use libpari unless you have backwards compatibility requirements.
* GNU readline library. This provides line editing under GP,
an automatic context-dependent completion, and an editable history of
commands. Note that it is incompatible with SUN commandtools (yet another
reason to dump Suntools for X Windows).
* GNU gzip/gunzip/gzcat package enables GP to read compressed
data.
* GNU emacs. GP can be run in an Emacs buffer, with all the
obvious advantages if you are familiar with this editor. Note that
readline is still useful in this case since it provides a better
automatic completion than is provided by Emacs GP-mode.
* perl provides extended online help (full text from this
manual) about functions and concepts, which can be used under GP or
independently (http://www.perl.com will direct you to the nearest
CPAN archive site).
* A colour-capable xterm, which enables GP to use different
(user configurable) colours for its output. All xterm programs which
come with current X11 distributions satisfy this requirement.
First, have a look at the MACHINES file
to see if anything funny applies to your architecture or operating system.
Then, type
./Configure
in the toplevel directory. This attempts to configure PARI/GP
without outside help. Note that if you want to install the end product in
some nonstandard place, you can use the --prefix option, as in
./Configure --prefix = /an/exotic/directory
(the default prefix is /usr/local). For example, to build a
package for a Linux distribution, you may want to use
./Configure --prefix = /usr
This phase extracts some files and creates a directory Oxxx where the
object files and executables will be built. The xxx part depends on your
architecture and operating system, thus you can build GP for several
different machines from the same source tree (the builds are
independent and can be done simultaneously).
Technical note: Configure accepts many other flags
besides --prefix. See Configure --help for a complete list. In
particular, there are sets of flags related to GNU MP (--with-gmp*) and
GNU readline library (--with-readline*). Note that autodetection of GMP
is disabled by default, you probably want to enable it.
Decide whether you agree with what Configure printed on your screen, in
particular the architecture, compiler and optimization flags. Look for
messages prepended by ###, which report genuine problems. If
anything should have been found and was not, consider that Configure
failed and follow the instructions in the next section. Look especially for
the gmp, readline and X11 libraries, and the perl and
gunzip (or zcat) binaries.
To compile the GP binary and build the documentation, type
make all
To only compile the GP binary, type
make gp
in the toplevel directory. If your make program supports
parallel make, you can speed up the process by going to the Oxxx
directory that Configure created and doing a parallel make here, for
instance make -j4 with GNU make. It should even work from the toplevel
directory.
To test the binary, type make bench. This will build a static
executable (the default, built by make gp is probably dynamic) and
run a series of comparative tests on those two. To test only the default
binary, use make dobench which starts the bench immediately.
The static binary should be slightly faster. In any case, this should not
take more than a few seconds on modern machines. See the file
MACHINES to get an idea of how much time comparable systems need.
We would appreciate a short note in the same format in case your system is
not listed and you nevertheless have a working GP executable.
If a [BUG] message shows up, something went wrong. The testing utility
directs you to files containing the differences between the test output and
the expected results. Have a look and decide for yourself if something is
amiss. If it looks like a bug in the Pari system, we would appreciate a
report (see the last section).
In case the default Configure run fails miserably, try
./Configure -a
(interactive mode) and answer all the questions (there are not that
many). Of course, Configure still provides defaults for each answer
but if you accept them all, it will fail just the same, so be wary. In any
case, we would appreciate a bug report (see the last section).
The precise default destinations are as
follows: the gp binary, the scripts gphelp and tex2mail go
to prefix/bin. The pari library goes to prefix/lib and
include files to prefix/include/pari. Other system-dependant data go
to prefix/lib/pari.
Architecture independent files go to various subdirectories of
share_prefix, which defaults to prefix/share, and can be
specified via the --share-prefix argument. Man pages go into
share_prefix/man, Emacs files into
share_prefix/emacs/site-lisp/pari, and other system-independant data
to various subdirectories of $share_prefix/pari: documentation,
sample GP scripts and C code, extra packages like elldata or
galdata.
You can also set directly --bindir (executables),
--libdir (library), --includedir (include files), --mandir
(manual pages), --datadir (other architecture-independent data), and
finally --sysdatadir (other architecture-dependent data).
Configure lets the following environment
variable override the defaults if set:
AS: Assembler.
CC: C compiler.
DLLD: Dynamic library linker.
LD: Static linker.
For instance, Configure may avoid /bin/cc on some
architectures due to various problems which may have been fixed in your
version of the compiler. You can try
env CC = cc Configure
and compare the benches. Also, if you insist on using a C++
compiler and run into trouble with a fussy g++, try to use
g++ -fpermissive.
The contents of the following variables are appended to the
values computed by Configure:
CFLAGS: Flags for CC.
CPPFLAGS: Flags for CC (preprocessor).
LDFLAGS: Flags for LD.
The contents of the following variables are prepended to
the values computed by Configure:
C_INCLUDE_PATH is prepended to the list of directories
searched for include files. Note that adding -I flags to
CFLAGS is not enough since Configure sometimes
relies on finding the include files and parsing them, and it does not
parse CFLAGS at this time.
LIBRARY_PATH is prepended to the list of directories
searched for libraries.
You may disable inlining by adding -DDISABLE_INLINE to
CFLAGS, and prevent the use of the volatile keyword with
-DDISABLE_VOLATILE.
If you also want to debug the PARI library,
Configure -g
creates a directory Oxxx.dbg containing a special
Makefile ensuring that the GP and PARI library built there is
suitable for debugging. If you want to
profile GP or the library, using gprof for instance,
Configure -pg
will create an Oxxx.prf directory where a suitable version
of PARI can be built.
The GP binary built above with make all or make gp is optimized.
If you have run Configure -g or -pg and want to build a special
purpose binary, you can cd to the .dbg or .prf directory
and type make gp there. You can also invoke make gp.dbg or
make gp.prf directly from the toplevel.
The kernel can be fully specified via the
--kernel = fqkn switch. The PARI kernel is build from two kernels,
called level 0 (L0, operation on words) and level 1 (L1, operation on
multi-precision integer and real).
Available kernels:
L0: auto, none and
alpha hppa hppa64 ia64 ix86 x86_64 m68k ppc sparcv7
sparcv8_micro sparcv8_super
L1: auto, none and gmp
auto means to use the auto-detected value. L0 = none means
to use the portable C kernel (no assembler), L1 = none means to use the
PARI L1 kernel.
* A fully qualified kernel name fqkn is of the form
L_0-L_1.
* A name not containing a dash '-' is an alias.
An alias stands for name-none, but gmp stand for
auto-gmp.
* The default kernel is auto-none.
Configure does not try very hard to find the readline library and
include files. If they are not in a standard place, it will not find them.
Nonetheless, it first searches the distribution toplevel for a readline
directory. Thus, if you just want to give readline a try, as you
probably should, you can get the source and compile it there (you do not need
to install it). You can also use this feature together with a symbolic link,
named readline, in the PARI toplevel directory if you have compiled the
readline library somewhere else, without installing it to one of its standard
locations.
You can also invoke Configure with one of the following arguments:
\kbd{--with-readline[ = prefix to lib/libreadline.xx and
include/readline.h]}
--with-readline-lib = path to libreadline.xx
--with-readline-include = path to readline.h
Technical note: Configure can build GP on different architectures
simultaneously from the same toplevel sources. Instead of the readline
link alluded above, you can create readline-osname-arch,
using the same naming conventions as for the Oxxx directory,
e.g readline-linux-i686.
Known problems:
* on Linux: Linux distributions have separate readline and
readline-devel packages. You need both of them installed to
compile gp with readline support. If only readline is installed,
Configure will complain. Configure may also complain about a
missing libncurses.so, in which case, you have to install the
ncurses-devel package (some distributions let you install
readline-devel without ncurses-devel, which is a bug in
their package dependency handling).
* on OS X.4: Tiger comes equipped with a fake readline,
which is not sufficient for our purpose. As a result, gp is built
without readline support. Since readline is not trivial to install
in this environment, a step by step solution can be found in the PARI
FAQ, see
http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/
BUG shows up in make benchprogram: the GP function install may not be available on
your platform, triggering an error message (``not yet available for this
architecture''). Have a look at the MACHINES files to check if your
system is known not to support it, or has never been tested yet.
* If when running gp-dyn, you get a message of the form
ld.so: warning: libpari.so.xxx has older revision than expected xxx
(possibly followed by more errors), you already have a dynamic PARI
library installed and a broken local configuration. Either remove the
old library or unset the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Try to
disable this variable in any case if anything very wrong occurs with
the gp-dyn binary, like an Illegal Instruction on startup. It does not
affect gp-sta.
* Some implementations of the diff utility (on HPUX for
instance) output No differences encountered or some similar
message instead of the expected empty input. Thus producing a spurious
[BUG] message.
make test-compat. If you
want to test the graphic routines, use make test-ploth. You will
have to click on the mouse button after seeing each image. There will be
eight of them, probably shown twice (try to resize at least one of them
as a further test). More generaly, typing make without argument
will print the list of available extra tests among all available targets.
The make bench and make test-compat runs produce a Postscript
file pari.ps in Oxxx which you can send to a Postscript
printer. The output should bear some similarity to the screen images.
make test-kernel checks whether the low-level kernel seems to work,
and provides simple diagnostics if it does not. Only useful if make
bench fails horribly, e.g. things like 1+1 do not work.
make test-all runs all available test suites. Slow.
When everything looks fine, type
make install
You may have to do this with superuser privileges, depending on the
target directories. (Tip for MacOS X beginners: use sudo make install.)
In this case, it is advised to type make all first to avoid running
unnecessary commands as root.
Beware that, if you chose the same installation directory as before in the
Configure process, this will wipe out any files from version 1.39.15
and below that might already be there. Libraries and executable files from
newer versions (starting with version 1.900) are not removed since they are
only links to files bearing the version number (beware of that as well: if
you are an avid gp fan, do not forget to delete the old pari libraries
once in a while).
This installs in the directories chosen at Configure time the default
GP executable (probably gp-dyn) under the name gp, the default
PARI library (probably libpari.so), the necessary include files, the
manual pages, the documentation and help scripts and emacs macros.
To save on disk space, you can manually gzip some of the documentation
files if you wish: usersch*.tex and all dvi files (assuming your
xdvi knows how to deal with compressed files); the online-help system
can handle it.
By default, if a dynamic library libpari.so could be built, the static
library libpari.a will not be created. If you want it as well, you can
use the target make install-lib-sta. You can install a statically
linked gp with the target make install-bin-sta. As a rule,
programs linked statically (with libpari.a) may be slightly faster
(about 5% gain), but use more disk space and take more time to compile.
They are also harder to upgrade: you will have to recompile them all instead
of just installing the new dynamic library. On the other hand, there is no
risk of breaking them by installing a new pari library.
The following optional packages endow PARI with some extra capabilities (only two packages for now!).
* elldata: This package contains the elliptic curves in
John Cremona's database. It is needed by the functions ellidentify,
ellsearch and can be used by ellinit to initialize a curve
given by its standard code.
* galdata: The default polgalois function can only
compute Galois groups of polynomials of degree less or equal to 7. Install
this package if you want to handle polynomials of degree bigger than 7 (and
less than 11).
To install package pack, you need to fetch the separate archive:
pack.tgz which you can download from the pari server.
Copy the archive in the PARI toplevel directory, then extract its
contents; these will go to data/pack/. Typing make
install installs all such packages.
GPRC file:Copy the file misc/gprc.dft (or
gprc.dos if you are using GP.EXE) to $HOME/.gprc. Modify
it to your liking. For instance, if you are not using an ANSI terminal,
remove control characters from the prompt variable. You can also
enable colors.
If desired, read datadir/misc/gpalias from the gprc
file, which provides some common shortcuts to lengthy names; fix the path in
gprc first. (Unless you tampered with this via Configure, datadir is
prefix/share/pari.) If you have superuser privileges and want to
provide system-wide defaults, copy your customized .gprc file to
/etc/gprc.
In older versions, gphelp was hidden in pari lib directory and was not
meant to be used from the shell prompt, but not anymore. If gp complains it
cannot find gphelp, check whether your .gprc (or the system-wide
gprc) does contain explicit paths. If so, correct them according to the
current misc/gprc.dft.
Building gp with make all also builds
its documentation. You can also type directly make doc. In any case,
you need a working (plain) TeX installation.
After that, the doc directory contains various dvi files:
libpari.dvi (manual for the PARI library), users.dvi (manual
for the gp calculator), tutorial.dvi (a tutorial), and
refcard.dvi (a reference card for GP). You can send these files to your
favourite printer in the usual way, probably via dvips. The reference
card is also provided as a PostScript document, which may be easier to
print than its dvi equivalent (it is in Landscape orientation and
assumes A4 paper size).
If the pdftex package is part of your TeX setup, you can
produce these documents in PDF format, which may be more convenient for
online browsing (the manual is complete with hyperlinks); type
make docpdf
All these documents are available online from PARI home page (see the last section).
Once all libraries and include files are installed,
you can link your C programs to the PARI library. A sample makefile
examples/Makefile is provided to illustrate the use of the various
libraries. Type make all in the examples directory to see how
they perform on the extgcd.c program, which is commented in the
manual.
This should produce a statically linked binary extgcd-sta
(standalone), a dynamically linked binary extgcd-dyn (loads libpari
at runtime) and a shared library libextgcd, which can be used from
gp to install your new extgcd command.
The standalone binary should be bulletproof, but the other two may fail
for various reasons. If when running extgcd-dyn, you get a message
of the form ``DLL not found'', then stick to statically linked binaries
or look at your system documentation to see how to indicate at linking
time where the required DLLs may be found! (E.g. on Windows, you will
need to move libpari.dll somewhere in your PATH.)
Several complete sample GP programs are also given in
the examples directory, for example Shanks's SQUFOF factoring method,
the Pollard rho factoring method, the Lucas-Lehmer primality test for
Mersenne numbers and a simple general class group and fundamental unit
algorithm. See the file examples/EXPLAIN for some explanations.
If you want to use gp under GNU Emacs, read the file
emacs/pariemacs.txt. If you are familiar with Emacs, we suggest that
you do so.
PARI's home page at the address
http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/
maintains an archive of mailing lists dedicated to PARI, documentation (including Frequently Asked Questions), a download area and our Bug Tracking System (BTS). Bug reports should be submitted online to the BTS, which may be accessed from the navigation bar on the home page or directly at
http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/Bugs
Further information can be found at that address but, to report a
configuration problem, make sure to include the relevant *.dif files in
the Oxxx directory and the file pari.cfg.
There are three mailing lists devoted to PARI/GP (run courtesy of Dan Bernstein), and most feedback should be directed to those. They are:
* pari-announce: to announce major version changes.
You cannot write to this one, but you should probably subscribe.
* pari-dev: for everything related to the development
of PARI, including suggestions, technical questions, bug reports or patch
submissions. (The BTS forwards the mail it receives to this list.)
* pari-users: for everything else.
You may send an email to the last two without being subscribed. (You will have to confirm that your message is not unsollicited bulk email, aka Spam.) To subscribe, send empty messages respectively to
pari-announce-subscribe@@list.cr.yp.to
pari-users-subscribe@@list.cr.yp.to
pari-dev-subscribe@@list.cr.yp.to
You can also write to us at the address
pari@@math.u-bordeaux.fr
but we cannot promise you will get an individual answer.
If you have used PARI in the preparation of a paper, please cite it in the following form (BibTeX format):
@@manual{PARI2,
organization = "{The PARI~Group}",
title = "{PARI/GP, Version @vers}",
year = 2006,
address = "Bordeaux",
note = "available from {\tt http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/}"
}
In any case, if you like this software, we would be indebted if you could send us an email message giving us some information about yourself and what you use PARI for.
Good luck and enjoy!