Before building CABLE, install the following:

1. GCC-XML This is used by CABLE to parse C++ code. Use release 0.4, which has CVS branch tag "Release-0-4".
2. CMake This is used to build CABLE on both UNIX and Windows platforms.

CABLE's installation works differently depending on your platform. You should use a build of CABLE that was done by the compiler that will be used to build the generated wrapper code. Due to incompatabilities among compilers, CABLE makes some decisions about how to generate code based on the compiler with which it was built. See the page on Running CABLE for a list of supported platforms.

Windows

You must build CABLE from a CVS source tree. See the Download page for details on obtaining the source. Make sure you have CMake installed and that you are somewhat familiar with using it. See the CMake Documentation for more information.

CMake will create project files for building with Visual C++ 6.0. Building out-of-source is very easy, and is strongly recommended. Run the CMakeSetup dialog, and point it at your copy of the CABLE source tree. Specify also a build directory where the files should be placed. CMake will create a parallel directory structure to the CABLE source tree at this location. Now use Visual Studio to open the workspace file CABLE.dsw from the root of the build directory. Set the ALL_BUILD project as active, and build it. CABLE can now be used directly from its build directory. See the page on Running CABLE for instructions.

UNIX & Cygwin

You must build CABLE from a CVS source tree. See the Download page for details on obtaining the source. Make sure you have CMake installed by this point.

Projects built with CMake can easily be built out-of-source. Doing so is strongly recommended. For simplicity, the rest of these instructions assume that you have the source tree in ~/Cable and will perform the build in a parallel directory ~/Cable-build.

UNIX Quick Start

Most people will want to build CABLE with all the defaults. You can use these commands to do so:

$ mkdir ~/Cable-build
$ cd ~/Cable-build
$ cmake ../Cable
$ make
$ su
# make install


This will use an installation prefix of /usr/local. If you want to select a different installation prefix, put the text

CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:STRING=/prefix/here

in the file ~/Cable-build/CMakeCache.txt before running the "cmake ../Cable" command from above. You may also use the Curses interface to CMake by running "ccmake ../Cable". All configuration options are available through this interface, including the installation prefix.

Customizing Your UNIX Build

If you want to set specific CABLE options before building, you will need to be somewhat familiar with the CMake configuration methodology. See the CMake Documentation for more information.

It is also possible to use CABLE directly from its build directory, so you can skip the "make install" step. See the page on Running CABLE for instructions on using it from the build directory.