This is the Ringing Class Library, and this file contains some notes
about installing and using the library.

Introduction
------------

  The Ringing Class Library is a collection of C++ classes which represent
the objects studied in English change ringing.  These include rows, changes,
methods and method libraries.  The project's home page can be found at
  http://ringing-lib.sourceforge.net/
where there is also information about how you can contribute, report bugs,
and get at discussion forums.


Dependencies
------------

  The Ringing Class Library can optionally be built to use the Xerces XML
library to support XML method libraries.  This can be controlled by the
--with-xerces (or --without-xerces) options to ./configure.  The gsiril 
program that is supplied with the library can be compiled with GNU readline
to support better command line editing.  The --with-readline option controls
this.  When no explicit option is given to ./configure, it attempts to 
locate the libraries and will use them if they can be found.

  To use Xerces from Microsoft Visual Studio, edit the ringing/common-msvc.h
header to define RINGING_USE_XERCES to 1, and manually add xerces to the 
list of libraries and headers required.  (This is done via Settings on the 
Project menu.  In the C/C++ tab, choose "Preprocessor" in the Category 
selector and add the include directory to "Additional include directories".
Then in the Link tab, add Xerces's .lib file to "Object/library modules".  

  Use of readline from Microsoft Visual Studio is untested.


Installation
------------

  If you have a Unix-like system, you should be able to type ./configure to
configure the package.  In particular, this will look at whether your C++
compiler supports various language features such as namespaces and exceptions.
The results of these tests are put into the file ringing/common-am.h as macro
definitions.  It is possible that you will want to edit this file by hand to
change the default behaviour of the class library.  You can then type `make'
to compile the package, and `make install' to install it.  For more details,
see the file INSTALL in this directory.

  If you are using Microsoft Visual Studio, a workspace file (ringing-lib.dsw)
is provided.  This contains project files to build the ringing class library 
itself as well as the example programs.  There should be no need to create the
file ringing/common-am.h by hand as a Visual Studio specific version of the
file (called ringing/common-msvc.h) is supplied and used automatically.  After
compiling the library, you may wish to copy all the header files in the 
`ringing' directory to somewhere your C++ compiler will find them.

  If you are using Windows with a compiler other than Microsoft Visual Studio,
or any other system on which ./configure does not work, you should copy the 
file ringing/common-am.h.in to ringing/common-am.h and edit it to indicate how
your C++ compiler behaves and where your standard header files are to be 
found.  The comments in that file explain which parts need to be customised.  
After customisation, you should be able to compile all the files in the 
`ringing' directory into a library.  You should then install all the header 
files in that directory to somewhere where your C++ compiler will find them 
(as #include <ringing/row.h> etc.)


Using the library
-----------------

  The documentation describing how to use the library is in the `doc' sub-
directory.  If you don't have the software necessary to build the Texinfo
documentation, you can download it separately in various formats from the
project web page (see above).


Supported compilers
-------------------

  It is hoped that the class library will compile on any modern C++ compiler.
However, at present the code is generally only tested using the latest
version of GCC.