Building DART

1. It is assumed that you have already downloaded (or checked out) the source distribution; see Downloading Dart for details on how to do this.
2. You will need GNU tools including gcc (v4.0 or later), make, binutils and coreutils
   • See the INSTALL file in the top-level directory for more info (or type more dart/INSTALL)
   • These tools come with many linux distributions, but gcc in particular, though stable in the last couple of years, has evolved by leaps & bounds in the past and may be out of date if you have an old distro
   • Mac users may need to install xcode tools
   • Dart will probably build under Windows, but it isn't supported. You may need Cyg Win
3. (Optional) If you want to use Scheme from within dart programs (specifically xrate, whose macro language can include Scheme evaluation) then you will need to install Guile before building xrate.
   • The current version of guile requires GMP to be installed.
   • You should then download & install the latest stable release of Guile from here.
   • If this all seems like too much hassle, you can probably just skip this step: most xrate grammars (as of April 2010) do not include Scheme expressions, and dart can be built without guile support.
4. Type the following:
   • cd dart; ./configure; make
5. (Optional) To run the built-in tests, type:
   • make test
6. Set up your environment variables (required for Window Licker and some other programs):
   • You may want to set the environment variable DARTDIR to point to the root dart directory. Some of the programs require this (or, at least, they work better that way).
   • To use the dart perl modules, or run many of the Dart Perl Scripts, you will need to add dart/perl to your PERL5LIB environment variable.

Dart binaries and Perl modules

Add the following lines to your .cshrc if you want to have the dart binaries in your path and use the dart perl modules in Perl scripts:

setenv DARTDIR $HOME/dart
setenv PATH $DARTDIR/bin:$PATH
setenv PERL5LIB $DARTDIR/perl:$PERL5LIB

Obviously the first line should point to wherever your dart tree is at. I also had to add a dummy setenv PERL5LIB line before this, to initialise the PERL5LIB variable.

If you're a bash user, you'll need to put the following in .bashrc instead:

export DARTDIR=$HOME/dart
export PATH=$DARTDIR/bin:$PATH
export PERL5LIB=$DARTDIR/perl

DARTDIR

Some programs in dart expect the environment variable $DARTDIR to point to the root of the dart source tree. If $DARTDIR is not defined, the default value is the path to the configure script. If this is not the correct value (for example, if dart was compiled on an NFS server but is intended to be used by client machines on that NFS), you can override it at configure-time like so: ./configure --srcdir=/nfs/path/to/dart. (This is something of an abuse of the --srcdir option; the true GNU way would be to use --prefix.)

-- Ian Holmes