Swarm: development snapshot
The latest NEWS of major changes to Swarm available from the our CVS repository at our Savannah development site.
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Here be dragons...!
Swarm-2.2 is the last official release, and is the one we recommend to users. There are currently no snapshot releases.
Snapshot releases (when they are made) have not been tested on all platforms. Once installed on any platform, we expect everything should be fine with these pre-release editions. However, the difficulty is in compiling and installing Swarm. For some platforms, binary (pre-compiled) versions of the Swarm libraries are available, and one can have quite a bit of confidence in them. If no binary version is available, one must build from the source code itself, but this is an uncertain proposition on some platforms. We urge Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users to use our pre-compiled binary versions if possible. Linux users who do not find a pre-compiled package for their version should not expect too much trouble in building Swarm, but should consult the SwarmFaq and ask in swarm-support email list for help. People who want to build on other platforms will experience more challenges, but for people that are experienced with the GNU compiler suite (gcc) and GNU tools, it is not too incredibly difficult. The only substantial problem at the current time is that one often must install an upgraded versions of gcc, libtool, automake, autoconf, gperf, emacs, blt, tcl, or tk. Not all of this is completely documented. Programmers who install on other platforms (especially 64 bit systems) should expect to do some serious work. The source code may require considerable tweaking to get running... Proceed with caution!
With the usual disclaimer out of the way, sources for snapshot releases can be found at:
- http://ftp.swarm.org/pub/swarm/src/testing/. Look for the most recent date.
Binaries
Windows binaries
None at the moment.
GNU/Linux binaries
None at the moment. Paul Johnson occasionally maintains snapshots for various versions of Red Hat and Fedora Core Linux; see the stable release page for a link to these.
Other platforms
Due to the effort required to maintain binary packages only the stable release has official binary packages for most of the platforms Swarm can be run on. Anybody wishing to volunteer as a maintainer for binary packages of the "snapshot" release for other platforms, please contact us via the Swarm mailing lists!
SVN Repository
The Swarm CVS repository has been migrated to a Subversion (SVN) repository. It is still hosted at GNU's Savannah server: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm/. You can browse the source on the web, or check it out to your machine.
The old CVS repository is still online but any modifications to it will likely be ignored; we keep it around for those who still have old checkouts so they can do "cvs diff" for their local modifications. At some point in the future, we will disable access to it completely.
The Swarm SVN Repository is organized like most standard SVN repositories with top-level trunk, branches and tags directories. If you checkout the top-level directory then you will get a very large directory tree as a result, this is because there are many tags and branches over Swarm's history. Likely you don't want everything, but maybe a specific directory. If you want the most recent source which is the current development, then you want the trunk:
svn co svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/swarm/trunk
If you are interested in bug fixes for older stable releases or branched development then you want a subdirectory of the branches directory. You can get a list of the branches using the list command:
svn list svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/swarm/branches
Then checkout just the branch you are interested in:
svn co svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/swarm/branches/2.3-release
If you are interested in exactly the code that was in a release, then you want one of the tags subdirectories. There are many tags so first get a list:
svn list svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/swarm/tags
Then checkout just the tag you are interested in:
svn co svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/swarm/tags/Swarm-2_3
In order to build this from SVN you will need a number of development tools, such as autoconf, automake and libtool. Running the autogen.sh script in the SVN checkout will report the current version of these tools that are required, if they are not installed on your system.
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