GAP for Debian
--------------

GAP (http://www.gap-system.org) provide a lot of extra component, most of them
are not packaged yet. However, care has been taken so that you can locally
install them either:

* in /usr/local/share/gap or /usr/local/lib/gap.

* in ~/gap.

Note they must usually be put in a sub-directory called pkg.
For example, the FactInt package provide a factint directory that must be moved
to ~/gap/pkg/factint.

To compile some of them, you will need to install the gap-dev package.

Since GAP can provide new packages at random time, I cannot garantee it will
work, but if it is not possible to install a package, I will be glad if you
told me about the problem.

Saved Workspaces, or How to make GAP start faster
-------------------------------------------------

GAP start slowly because it needs to parse all the libraries installed at
start up. To make GAP start faster, it is possible to save the GAP workspace
and reload it at next start up.

To that effect, Debian provides a script 'update-gap-workspace', see
the update-gap-workspace(1) manual page. 

Colors in the GAP shell 
-----------------------

If you would like the GAP shell to use color to display color for prompt,
input, etc., you can try colorprompt.g by Frank Luebeck.
Just enter
ColorPrompt(true);
at the GAP prompt.
Read /usr/share/gap/lib/colorprompt.g for more information.

Browsing GAP Documentation 
--------------------------

If you prefer nicely typeset documentation, you can use xpdf to display the GAP
online help.  Make sure xpdf is installed and issue the command
SetHelpViewer("xpdf");
at the gap prompt.

Large GAP libraries are compressed
----------------------------------

To save diskspace, the largest GAP libraries are gzip'ed. GAP automatically
uncompress them while reading them.

Supporting GAP
--------------

If you use GAP, please send a short note to support@gap-system.org stating you
use the Debian packages of GAP so the GAP team can keep track of the number of
GAP users. This helps them obtaining funding for the project.

--
Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org>  Wed, 12 Jan 2005 13:56:53 +0100
