Talk:Swarm: development snapshot

The latest NEWS of major changes to Swarm available from the our CVS repository at our Savannah development site.

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:

ftp://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 RPMs for snapshots for Red Hat Linux 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9 and Fedora Core 1, 2 and 3.

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!

CVS

For those wanting to be on the absolute bleeding-edge, the Swarm CVS repository is now available via anonymous CVS at via our project page: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm/ at Savannah. You can browse the source on the web, or check it out to your machine.

In order to build this from CVS you will need a number of development tools, such as autoconf, automake and libtool. Running the autogen.sh script in the CVS checkout will report the current version of these tools that are required, if they are not installed on your system.