pcompress/INSTALL

Copyright (c) 2012 Moinak Ghosh

Basic Installation
==================
The simplest process to build and install this utility is:

./config
make
make install

In order to remove all binaries:
make clean

Remove all binaries and the generated Makefile:
make distclean

Strictly speaking the 'make install' step is not required to
run the utility as it is a single stand alone program for now.

The config script controls various compile time parameters and
generates the actual Makefile. You can get a short description
of all the options by running:

./config --help

NOTE: Basic Installation does not enable support for Libbsc, a
      new block-sorting compressor (similar to but better than
      Bzip2). See below for details.

Testing
=======

After running make as given above you can run:
make test

This will generate some data files from /usr/bin /usr/share and
/usr/include directories and then run a whole lot of tests. These
execute pcompress with a wide variety of combinations of options.
For every test both compression and decompression are performed
and after every decompression the decompressed file is verified
byte for byte with the original using the diff utility.

It takes a while to run all the tests.

Custom Installation
===================
The options to the config script are detailed below. Note that this is
not the usual GNU Autoconf script.

./config [<options>]

<options> can be one of the following:

--prefix=<val>		The installation prefix. 
			This is set to /usr by default. However alternate
			prefix needs to eb used during packaging.

--enable-debug		Enable debug mode compilation.
			This reduces the compiler optimization level to
			basic and taks out all the loop optimization flags.
			This is primarily to aid debugging.

--disable-allocator	Disable use of internal memory allocator mechanism.
			The internal allocator can be totally disabled by
			setting this build time flag. It is also possible
			to dynamically disable the allocator by setting the
			following env variable:
			ALLOCATOR_BYPASS=1

--enable-debug-stats	Enable printing of some verbose debug info.
			This at present shows some info related to Dedupe
			efficiency.

--with-libbsc=<path_to_libbsc_source>
			Enable support for libbsc (See: libbsc.com). Full
			path to the libbsc source tree must be provided. It
			links the library statically.

--help			Display the help message.

Steps for building with libbsc support
======================================
1) Download libbsc source from:  http://libbsc.com/ . Click on the
   "Download TAR Ball" button. Downloading the 3.1.0 release from the
   Github project download page will Not work.

2) Extract the gzippped tarball. It will create a directory for example:
   IlyaGrebnov-libbsc-0b12f29

3) Now cd into the pcompress directory and execute the config script
   with the full path to the libbsc source directory. For example:

   ./config --with-libbsc=/full/path/to/IlyaGrebnov-libbsc-0b12f29

4) Now run make in the pcompress directory. This will also run make in
   the libbsc source directory to build it.