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Installing pycppad

Requires
This package requires the following other packages:
  1. The Boost Python (development version) must be installed.
  2. The python numpy library must be installed.
  3. The CppAD package will be automatically downloaded and used (but not installed).


Downloading
Download the file pycppad-20100319.tar.gz and store it on your machine.

Unpacking
On unix, you could use the command 
 
	tar -xvzf  pycppad-20100319.tar.gz
which would create the directory pycppad-20100319.

Required Setup Information
The value of the following setup variables, in the file 
 
	pycppad-20100319/setup.py
must be set to agree with your system: 
 
     # Directory where Boost Python library is located
     boost_python_lib_dir = '/usr/lib' 
     # The name of the Boost Python library in that directory which must
     # begin with 'lib' and end with '.so'.
     boost_python_lib_name  = 'libboost_python.so' 
     # The CppAD tarball will be downloaded into this directory
     # and it will be extraced to a subdirectory called  cppad-* or CppAD-*
     cppad_parent_dir = os.environ.get('HOME') + '/install'
     #
Note that Boost Python must be installed before you can properly set this information (but CppAD need not be installed).

Building

With Debugging
Change into the directory pycppad-20100319 and execute the command 
 
	./setup.py build_ext --inplace --debug --undef NDEBUG
to compile and link a version of the CppAD extension module with debugging (improved error messaging).

Optimized
You can compile and link an optimized version of the CppAD extension module with the command 
 
	./setup.py build_ext --inplace
Note that in the optimized version, certain error checking is not done and improper use of pycppad.cpp may lead to a segmentation fault.

Bug in Python Distutils
When using the GNU C++ compiler gcc, the warning 
 
cc1plus: warning: command line option "-Wstrict-prototypes" is valid for Ada/C/ObjC but not for C++
will be printed. This is not requested by setup.py but is rather a bug in the Python distutils package.

Testing
You can test of all the examples in the pycppad documentation. Change into the directory pycppad-20100319 and execute the command 
 
	python test_example.py
You can run some more tests with the command 
 
	python test_more.py


Installing
Installing pycppad copies it to the standard location for you system. You may or may not preform this step:

Change into the directory pycppad-20100319 and execute the command
     python setup.py install --prefix=prefix
 or just
     ./setup.py install --prefix=prefix
 where prefix is the prefix for the location where you wish to install pycppad. Note that some common choices for prefix are
$HOME if you are not the system administrator for this machine
/usr/local you're administrator and the system has a package manager (like yum, apt-get).
/usr you're the administrator but the system does not have a package manager.

Uninstalling
Unfortunately, python's distutils package does not provide an uninstall command. You can uninstall the pycppad package by removing the entries
     prefix/lib/pythonmajor.minor/site-packages/pycppad
     prefix/lib/pythonmajor.minor/site-packages/pycppad-20100319.egg-info
     prefix/share/doc/pycppad
 where major and minor are the major and minor version numbers printed by the command 
 
	python --version


Python Path
If you have not installed pycppad, you will not be able to use the python command
     import pycppad
 unless the distribution directory 
 
	pycppad-20100319
is in your python path. If you have installed pycppad, the installation directory
     prefix/lib/pythonmajor.minor/site-packages
 must be in you python path (to use the import pycppad command). You can check your python path with the following commands 
 
	python
	import sys
	sys.path
If the required directory is not yet there, you could add the directory above to your python path using the command
     sys.path.append('prefix/lib/pythonmajor.minor/site-packages')
 You can avoid having to do this every time you load python by adding the path to your environment variable PYTHONPATH. For example, if you are using the bash shell, you could add the command
     export PYTHONPATH="prefix/lib/pythonmajor.minor/site-packages"
 to your $HOME/.bashrc file.

pycppad Documentation
The documentation for pycppad starts out in the directory 
 
	pycppad-20100319/doc
During the installation process, it is copied to the directory
     prefix/share/doc/pycppad
Input File: omh/install.omh