GGobi makes extensive use of XML and inputs provided in the XML format, while still maintaining supporting for the older input style used in xgobi. This use of XML, and specifically the parser provided as part of the libxml distribution, increases the dependencies on other software that must be available to install and run GGobi. Because there are many different versions of libxml, some installed on the system and others installed by individual users, matching the correct version of GGobi with the correct version of libxml with both at configuration- and run-time becomes very complex. Our approach intends to err on the side of simplicity rather than maximal flexibility.

We have made two versions of the GGobi source available: ggobi.tar.gz and ggobi-xml.tar.gz. The difference between these is that the second (ggobi-xml.tar.gz) contains an unaltered version of a libxml distribution that is known to work with GGobi. If you already have libxml (version 2) available on your machine, you can download ggobi.tar.gz which is (currently) half the size of ggobi-xml.tar.gz. If you have an incompatible version of libxml, or cannot install libxml on the system, it will probably be simplest to download ggobi-xml.tar.gz and have the GGobi installation build the contained libxml distribution.

In either case, one builds GGobi with XML support with the commands

  ./configure --with-xml   [any other configuration arguments]
  make

We strongly suggest that you perform a complete installation of libxml, version 2 onto your system before compiling the GGobi distribution. (A version of libxml known to work with GGobi is available with in the (bigger) tar file.) This will make libxml available to all users of the system in a standard location. To do this you will need root access for your machine, or need to ask your system administrator to do it for you. The steps are simple.

  1. Download libxml
  2. configure the distribution for the build: use the command
         ./configure 
    
    If you want it to be installed in a non-default directory, use a command such as
       ./configure --prefix=/whatever/directory/it/should/go/in
    
  3. Build the library
      make
    
  4. Install the executables, libraries, etc. into the system area where others can access them.
      make install
    
At this point, the GGobi configuration script will be able to find the information it needs about the libxml installation and will succeed in working. It uses the executable xml2-config (created during the make install part of the libxml installation) to get this information, and the directory in which this is installed (the bin/ directory) should be in your path when configuring GGobi.

Given the installed XML library, one builds the GGobi distribution by changing to the ggobi/ directory and issuing the command

 ./configure --with-xml

Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@research.bell-labs.com>
Last modified: Wed Sep 19 10:08:14 EDT 2001