Starlink distributes its software products in a variety of ways.
The Project makes periodic binary releases. These are made every six months in principle, though the intervals are usually somewhat longer in fact. The set of platforms Starlink targets is not fixed, but in the latest release the list was Linux RHEL3, RH9 and Debian3.0, and Sparc 8/9, with a beta release for Mac OS X. For fuller details, see the `Software' link on the Starlink home page.
All the software in such a release is also available as source tarballs, and some components of the software set make interim source releases, also as source tarballs. This document is about how to build, and once built how to link against, these distributed source tarballs. It is a short document, since it is our intention that building and installing our software should be as simple as
exactly as for the majority of open-source software available now. Except where some technicality prevents it, all the Starlink libraries are installed as both static and shared libraries, and there should be no surprises in linking agsinst them. The only difference from the standard behaviour is that the default installation prefix for our software is in either% ./configure; make; make install
/star or /stardev (the
latter for interim releases or beta software), rather than
/usr/local. You can confirm this with ./configure
--help.The software should build without problems, as we have invested
considerable effort in making it portable across platforms and
compilers. As with any other very large software system, however, we
are aware of some wrinkles, and these are discussed in the
platform-specific notes in Section 2 below. If you find
any other problems, or have other comments on the build system, please
do get in touch with the Project, through the general contact address
ussc@star.rl.ac.uk.
You may be used to Starlink's earlier build system, based on
./mk scripts. This is now obsolete, and a migration path
is outlined in Section 3 below.
This document is concerned only with the Starlink `classic'
applications, and does not cover the newer Java applications. See
<http://www.starlink.ac.uk/java/java.htm> for details about these.