LPARSE INSTALLATION GUIDE
=========================

The Short Installation Guide
----------------------------

Run:

 1. configure
 2. make
 3. make install

This will compile lparse and install it to /usr/local/bin. You can
specify some other installation directory by using the --prefix=dir
argument of configure. You may also copy the lparse binary from the
src directory directly to where ever you desire. 

The Longer Installation Guide
-----------------------------

Lparse should compile in a unix environment with standard tools
straight from the box. However, there are two possible sources of
problems:

  1. Different versions of bison compiler generator tool name the
     definition files in different ways. 

  2. The dynamic loading library -ldl may be missing or have a
     different name. 

The configure script checks for these, but here are hints what to do
if configure fails for some reason. 

Bison
-----

Lparse's lexer definition file lex.ll supposes that the symbol
definition file is named parse.h. 

The Makefile works with the assumption that bison uses the file name
parse.cc.h and it then renames it to parse.h. This is because older
(pre 1.29b) versions of GNU bison uses that name. With newer bison
versions the command-line option --defines=parse.cc.h is used to force
that name. 

Dynamic Libraries
-----------------

Lparse allows the user to link his or her own C functions into lparse.
In unix systems this uses the -ldl library to do it. This feature is
encapsulated within #ifdef HAVE_DLFCN_H and #ifdef HAVE_LIBDL
definitions. These directives should be defined in src/config.h if the
header and the library is present but configure doesn't work for some
reason, and left out if they are missing. 

Windows Issues
==============

It is probably a good idea to compile lparse with GNU programming
tools also when using Windows. There used to be a special version of
config.h but there are nowadays so many different versions of Windows
that it didn't work reliably. 

