Building the Toolkit

SILC Toolkit works on various platforms, such as on several Unix systems and on Windows. Building of the Toolkit on some platform may differ from the other. This document describes how to build the Toolkit from the sources, to create linkable libraries and binaries, on all platforms the Toolkit support.

The building instructions for all platforms are also included in the Toolkit package. Please refer to the INSTALL file for general building instructions for Unix systems, README.WIN32 for building on Windows systems, and README.MACOSX for building on Mac OS X.

Building on Mac OS X

Building on Unix & Linux

Building the Toolkit on Unix will produce binaries of all libraries, and SILC Client and SILC Server. The Toolkit package includes also Client and Server as an example applications, and they are compiled automatically. The libraries are compiled to provide staticly linkable libraries. Two libraries are produced: libsilc.a and libsilcclient.a. The libsilc.a includes everything else except the Client library. The libsilcclient.a includes only the Client library.

To build Toolkit on Unix systems, give commands:

./configure make

On some systems you may need to give "gmake" command instead of "make". The ./configure can take several options as arguments. To see them all give command:

./configure --help

The most important configuration options you may consider to use are:

--enable-debug

If you would like to enable the debugging for the compiled binaries you can give this option to the `configure'. It is recommended to use this option when you are doing development with Toolkit. It is helpful to enable run-time debugging.

--with-gmp[=DIR]

If you wish to use GMP library for arbitrary precision arithmetic library instead of using the MPI library included in the package, you can give the --with-gmp[=DIR] option to the `configure'. The DIR is the upper path in your system which contains lib/ and include/ for GMP library.

--with-iconv[=DIR]

If your system doesn't provide iconv() function in its native libraries (usually libc) or if this function is broken (e.g. older Solaris systems), you may want to use libiconv instead. The DIR is the upper path in your system which contains lib/ and include/ for libiconv (e.g. /usr/local).

--without-irssi
--without-silcd

By default the SILC Toolkit will also build the Irssi SILC client and the SILC Server which use the SILC Toolkit as well. If you do not wish to compile these applications you can give --without-irssi to not compile Irssi SILC client (irssi/ directory) and/or --without-silcd to not compile SILC Server (silcd/ directory). Other applications the Toolkit does not build automatically.

--without-pthreads

If you do not want to compile the programs with POSIX multi-threads support you can give --without-pthreads option. This will disable the SILC Thread API and SILC Mutex API. Furthermore if SILC Thread API is used when this option is used, the routines work, but do not work in threads (are run in the calling process and can block the process).

--disable-asm

If you have trouble compiling the assembler optimized code in the package or does not want to use them, you can give the --disable-asm option to the `configure' script. This will assure that assembler optimized code is not compiled in.

--enable-ipv6

The `configure' will attempt to check for IPv6 support in your system. However, if it fails, but you still want to compile in the IPv6 support you can give --enable-ipv6 option to force the IPv6 support.

After compilation you can install the Toolkit into your system by giving the command:

make install

Building on Windows

The Toolkit can be compiled several different ways on Windows. However, this document describes the method to build the Toolkit to produce native Win32 binaries. The Toolkit package can also be compiled on Cygwin and MinGW. For these systems please refer to the README.WIN32 file in the Toolkit package.

The Toolkit package includes ready MSVC++ Workspace files, that will automatically compile the Toolkit. The MSVC++ workspace and project files resides in the win32/ subdirectory of the Toolkit package. The `silc.dsw' file is the workspace file that automatically supports compiling the Toolkit and to generate the SILC Core DLL and SILC Client DLL libraries.

The SILC Core DLL is named as libsilc and will generate libsilc.dll, and the SILC Client DLL is named as libsilcclient and will generate libsilcclient.dll. Both of the projects also automatically generates libsilc.lib and libsilcclient.lib import libraries that may be used to link against a client application.

Generally you do not need to do any specific settings to compile the Toolkit. However, you must compile the libsilc before compiling the libsilclient, since the SILC Client DLL depends on the SILC Core DLL. You may compile the DLLs as either Release or Debug version. Just select the preferred method of compilation. The Debug version will compile the SILC Toolkit with run-time debugging support, which is recommended when doing development with the Toolkit.

Building on Mac OS X

Building the Toolkit on Mac OS X is almost identical on compiling on Unix system. The reason for this is that the Mac OS X is Unix based operating system. To build the Toolkit on Mac OS X, give the following commands:

setenv CFLAGS -no-cpp-precomp ./configure powerpc make

The ./configure can take several options as arguments. To see them all give command:

./configure --help

If you do not want to compile the applications, or they do not compile on your system, you can also choose to compile only the libraries, and skip all applications. In this case, before giving the "make" command, go to the lib/ subdirectory, and give "make" command there:

cd lib/ make

After compilation you can install the Toolkit into your system by giving the command:

make install