General information
===================

Name		: PerMuVAR
Version		: 1.0.0
Summary		: PerMuVAR -- a MuPAD library for invariants of permutation groups
License		: LGPL
Vendor:		: Nicolas M. Thiéry <nthiery@users.sourceforge.net>
URL		: http://permuvar.sourceforge.net/
Requires	: 
Description	:
PerMuVAR is a library for the computer algebra system MuPAD
<http://www.mupad.de> for computing in invariant rings of permutation
groups. The purpose it to study (at least partially) permutation
groups that are too big to be treated by general invariant theory
software. The main design goals are the following:
 - Predictability (algorithms based only on linear algebra);
 - Reusability and extensibility (object oriented programming);
 - Efficiency (Use of special properties of permutation groups,
   use of external specialized libraries for critical sections).
PerMuVAR can use the specialized C++ library GLIP to speedup the
expensive isomorphism-related computations. In longer term, it will
may use an external linear algebra library (ALP?).


Requirements
============

The free computer algebra system MuPAD >=2.0 <http://www.mupad.de>.

The dynamic module GLIP >= 0.4 <http://glip.sourceforge.net>. This is
optional, but PerMuVAR runs much faster when using it. GLIP can be
compiled from the sources provided in the distribution of PerMuVAR.
Compiling GLIP requires a C++ compiler with good support for recent
features of the ANSI standard like templates specialization and
namespaces. gcc 2.95.2 or egcs 2.91.66 will do.


Download and Installation
=========================

PerMuVAR is distributed on the web page (see above) in precompiled
RPMs (GNU/linux i386), source RPMs and source code. Currently if MuPAD
is not installed in /usr/local/lib/MuPAD, you have to do the
installation from source code. We hope to fix this soon.

The installation from source code follows the usual scheme
configure/make/make install. See the file 'INSTALL' for generic
instructions and 'QuickInstall' for a brief summary.

License
=======

PerMuVAR is open source software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License, a
copy of which is provided in the file 'COPYING.LIB'. If you use this
software for your reseach, we ask you to cite it as you would cite a
journal or book and to tell us about it. This makes us feel useful :-)


Getting started & Documentation
===============================

The file 'Tutorial.mu' contains a tutorial. Hopefully, it provides a
general overview of what PerMuVAR is and is not able to do.

A good documentation still needs to be written. In the mean time,
information can be gathered from the source code. Most of the
procedures are well documented there. See for example
share/lib/DOMAINS/DOMAIN/PGrpIRng.mu for the procedures dealing with
invariant rings. The test suite (TEST/*.tst) also provides a lot of
examples.

Publications concerning PerMuVAR are available from the author's web
page <http://www.mines.edu/~nthiery/>.

To evaluate the efficiency of PerMuVAR, you can consult the file
'Benchmark', as well as the directory log, which contains the logs of
some computations done by the author on 500 MHz PCs running GNU/Linux.

The file 'mypermuvar.mu' defines some handy aliases and shortcuts, for
the long names used by PerMuVAR.


Bug reports & mailing lists
===========================

The web page (see General Information above) provides access to
mailing-lists as well as to a bug tracking system. Please use them for
bug reports, suggestions, flames and other comments. Any contribution
will be warmly welcomed. If you don't have web access, feel free to
contact directly the authors (see the file 'AUTHORS').

Please include the following information in any bug report:
 - Some information about your system:
   - What operating system and version,
   - For Linux, what version of the C library,
   - The version of the compiler (if you know),
   - Anything else you think is relevant;
 - A description of the bug itself;
 - If you can reproduce the bug, the exact steps to reproduce it;
 - Anything else which you think is helpful.


Notes for the maintainer
========================

The configure script is generated by automake/autoconf. Here is the
sequence of commands to recompile fully from scratch:

	make maintainer-clean
	rm -f config.cache \
           MAPITL/config.cache GLIP/config.cache GLIPmod/config.cache \
	   configure MAPITL/configure GLIP/configure GLIPmod/configure
	./bootstrap
	./configure --enable-glip
	make
	make check
	make install

To create a new release, update the files configure.in, NEWS and
ChangeLog, rebootstrap as above, and issue:

	make release