This redistricting program and census utilities are

Copyright (C) 2009
Joshua Justice, Sumanth Narendra, Alice Wang, Aaron Ciaghi, Stephen Long
Licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2, or at your option any later version.

To use this program, you need shapefiles with population data.
If your shapefiles do not have population data (as in the USA)
you want a program like census_merge, which is available here:
http://github.com/JoshJGT/census_merge

(Note that census_merge only works on USA-style census popfile/shapefile data.
If your data is in another format, you will need to modify the merger program.)

In order to compile the C portions of this program,
you will need to do the following:

cd src/main/C/shapelib-1.2.10
make
cd ..
make

In order to compile the java portions of this program, you will need Maven.
http://maven.apache.org/
Follow install instructions there.

Once maven is installed, cd to the root of the census_utils folder
(ls should show you pom.xml)

Use mvn compile and mvn install. Once this is done,

mvn exec:java -Dexec.args="-h"

will show the help screen.
The -Dexec.args="" portion of that command is where arguments to the program go.

If all this has worked thus far, you're ready to redistrict.

The first thing to do is generate contiguity.
Right now, there is no command line parsing for the C programs.

Edit contig.c to point sf_name[] to the file path.
Re-do make in its folder, then run ./contig.
Once contiguity lists are made, you may wish to view them.

In display.c, point sf_name[] to the shapefile.
Set use_dist to 0, and use_gal to 1.
Re-make it, then run ./display.
This produces a .svg file.
(This functionality is currently buggy.)

Alternatively, you can generate a contiguity list using another software package.
In R,
install.package('BARD')
fulton.map <- importBardShape(file.path("/home/data/Fulton"))
exportBardShape(file.path("/home/data/newFulton"))
will write a newFulton.GAL file.

Either way, running the redistricting program is possible at this point.
Note that use of the fast contiguity program is not recommended right now.
The loader is somewhat buggy and will not proceed correctly with some GAL files.
Unfortunately, as long as this bug exists, redistricting a state is not feasible.
(poly2nb runs in O(n^2) time which takes far too long on 200,000+ blocks!)

NOTES:

inkscape -D -e viewable.png WayTooLarge.svg
will give you a PNG from your SVG file.
man inkscape to get more options, including scales.
The display code scales up by 5000 by default.
#define SVG_SCALE 1 if you wish to do all scaling in inkscape.

export $MAVEN_OPTS -Xmx4g
(or whatever size of your choice) if the redistrict program runs out of memory.