Informations for Developers

General

This page is intended for information that should be used by developers of the Quantities package.

A developers' log is provided (and should be updated) under the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/quantity/develop> wiki facilities of project.

File Layout

The source code is organized in the following subdirectories (under the <_source_directory_>:

• Quantity
• PhysicalQuantities
• MathematicalQuantities
• GeneralQuantities

Each of the source code directories includes a subdirectory test which contains test programs. Documentation sources are located in subdirectory documentation. Supporting macros for the build system are located in subdirectory m4.

After installation, the following directories are generated and populated:

• <_install_directory_>/include/Quantities-<versionnumber>/Quantities: the header files in the respective subdirectories
• <_install_directory_>/lib/Quantities-<versionnumber><libtag>: the (possibly static and shared) libraries; libraries with different libtags are thus installed into different directories. If the libtag is different from an empty string, this encodes the fact whether the library contains debugging information (-d) or is optimized (-o). Selection of a library with particular properties defined by the libtag is easily done by selecting the respective directory.
• <_install_directory_>/share/Quantities-<versionnumber>: the documentation files, including the doxygen tag file, and the html as well as the latex subdirectories.

Thus, the installed file layout looks like this:

<_install_directory_>
+- include
| +- Quantities-<versionnumber>
| | +- Quantities
| | +- Quantity
| | +- PhysicalQuantities
| | +- GeneralQuantities
| | +- MathematicalQuantities
+- lib
| +- Quantities-<versionnumber>
| +- Quantities-<versionnumber>-o
| +- Quantities-<versionnumber>-d
| +- Quantities-<versionnumber>-o-d
+- share
| +- Quantities-<versionnumber>

Build System

The Quantities build system makes use of the autotools. In particular, during development, autoconf (version 2.63), automake (version 1.10.1) and libtool (version 2.2.6) were employed for the most recent version.

Additional functionality is imported through the boost.m4 macros, which have been adapted slightly (boost_BS.m4).

With the recent autotools (see above), it is no longer necessary to use the bootstrap skript after downloading the cvs code. Rather,

autoreconf --install

will prepare all necessary files.

After this, the common

./configure <options>
make
make install
make check
make doc
make doc-install

sequence (see, installation instructions) will install Quantities as described above.

As also mentioned above, libraries compiled and linked according to various configure options may be installed in the respective subdirectories in the <_install_directory_>/lib tree. It is important to purge the object files generated by the compilation step, before it is attempted to compile code with different options with

make clean

in the <_source_directory_>.

Note that for linking versions of Quantities with debug information or optimization enabled, the respective versions of the BSUtilities libraries must be available.

The following suggestions are provided for testing:

• use make distcheck for testing
• test on 32 and 64 bit machines
• also use a testuser environment without additional installations
• test downloaded cvs code
• use the test programs provided in <_source_directory>/*/test
• test completeness of documentation files by installing the documentation on a different machine and/or as a different user and try to read through a browser; also check the messages generated by make doc.

Preparing a New Version

If you are a developer and you want to create a new version of Quantities, you have to set the version number (unfortunately) in several places:

1. in the main Doxyfile as PROJECT_NUMBER
2. in configure.ac as an argument to macro AC_INIT
3. in version.h as value of QUANTITIES_VERSION
4. in file README (several instances)
5. in file documentation/history.txt

You should also set the recommended version number of BSutilities to be used in

1. configure.ac (several instances)
2. README (several instances)
3. file documentation/installation.txt (several instances}

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