Welcome to GNU Oleo!

Oleo is a spreadsheet program covered by the GNU Copyleft (see the file
COPYING included with this distribution for more information).

As of this writing (February 1999), Oleo is in active development. Major
changes are being made to the user interface, and lower-level changes
affecting the Oleo file format, expression syntax and macro language will
almost certainly follow in due course.  This is good news and bad news: On
the positive side, it does mean that someone besides yourself will be
concerned if you have problems compiling or running Oleo on a particular
architecture; but it also means that you cannot expect the Oleo of tomorrow
to behave in exactly the same way as the Oleo of today.

We therefore encourage you to download and compile this program, and to use
it, but for ephemeral tasks. If you have any problems, please send mail to
bug-oleo@gnu.org.  User feedback is extremely important to Oleo development.

At present, Oleo has the following features and (un-features):

Features
--------
	* Works on character terminals and under X
	* Macro language
	    (still a bit untidy in places, but it works)
	* Charts generated from spreadsheet data
	    (interface is not yet stable, but the capability is in there)
	* Sizeable library of expressions
	    (doesn't currently include statistical regressions)
	* File format conversions
	    (support of this is still pretty primitive; don't plan
	    on importing E*cel files anytime soon)
	* Confirmed to compile and run out of the box on: Linux, FreeBSD

As the above list shows, much work needs to be done to get Oleo to fulfill
its potential utility.  The framework is in place for collaboration and the
work has begun; to find out more, send a message to bug-oleo-request@gnu.org,
with "subscribe" as the only word in the subject line, and your email address
in the body of the message.  This list is the forum through which developers
confer and keep one another posted about what's happening.  Everyone with an
interest in the future of this application is encouraged to subscribe.

Even if you just want to take Oleo out for a spin around the block, however,
your comments will be welcomed by the developers.

Before compiling, be sure that you have the necessary building blocks
installed on your system:

System Requirements
-------------------

The system requirements for Oleo depend upon the user interface or
interfaces that you intend to compile into the binary.


(1) Character Terminal Interface Only

For the no-frills interface, try building with the following command line:

  ./configure --without-x && make

This no-frills character terminal interface does not offer support
for plotting, but otherwise it has the same capabilities as the
other versions.  This basic Oleo requires the following libraries:

	* some version of curses (NCurses or Termcap/curses)
	* GNU Gettext 0.10.32 (currently included in oleo)
	* GNU texinfo (3.12) to build the documentation


(2) Simple X11 Interface

For very basic X11 support, try building with the following:

  ./configure --without-motif && make

This interface provides very little beyond the basic character terminal
interface built with the previous command, but it will allow you to select a
cell with the mouse and use the cursor keys in an Xterm.  Like the no-frills
interface, this offers no support for plotting.  It of course requires the
basic X11 libraries to compile.  To run an Oleo compiled with X11 with
the character interface instead, run it with one of the command line options
-x or --nw.


(3) Motif Interface

To build an Oleo with Motif support, try building with the following:

  ./configure && make

The Motif interface shows where Oleo is headed. A binary produced in this
way can be used in character mode (i.e. by running it with the -x or --nw
options) but not in the no-frills X mode. To compile with Motif support,
you will need the following libraries on your system:

	* Motif or LessTif, Xlt (from LessTif) and Xbae 4.6.2
	* SciPlot (optional, for charts, if Xlt not used)
	* GNU plotutils (optional, for charts)
	* XmHTML (optional, for still-incomplete online documentation)


Compiling from CVS
------------------
If you are brave enough to download Oleo directly from the CVS:

    cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/oleo checkout oleo

there are a few steps beyond the normal installation procedure
that are required for a successful build.  This section assumes that
you have the necessary development tools already installed on your system.

    1.  Use aclocal to build aclocal.m4, the list of macros needed by
	automake as requested by configure.in:

	aclocal -I m4
    
    2.  Run autoheader to generate config.h.in template for configure.

	autoheader
    
    3.  Run autoconf to build configure from configure.in:

	autoconf
    
    4.  Run automake to generate Makefile.in from Makefile.am throughout
	the tree.  The "-a" tells it to create links to the system verisons
	of any missing required files.

	automake -a

Now run configure as before.