poloka

Poloka Home
General stuff
What is poloka ?
Installation instructions
Documentation
Useful Links
Documentation
Reference manual
FAQ

Welcome to the poloka home page ! Poloka is a software package used within the SNLS project to process images taken with the Megaprime instrument. Poloka is currently under active development and therefore is constantly evolving. We are trying however to keep it well documented, and (hopefully) reasonnably easy to use, especially for newcomers.

This page contains download, build and installation instructions. The impatient user can try the all-in-one script which will hopefully take care of the whole process.

Download and Installation instructions

Currently poloka is only available as source code. No binary distributions are available and we do not plan to change that in a near future. It makes sense, since almost all users of this package are its developpers.

Installing poloka is a two step procedure:
  • compile and install a few external packages poloka relies on.
  • compile and install poloka

Installing the dependencies

Below is a list of the software development tools you need to actually compile and link poloka with its dependencies:
  1. A C++ compiler. We only tested g++ (up to 4.1.3).
  2. A fortran (77) compiler. We only tested with g77.
  3. libtool libtools (version >=1.5.2).
  4. A package called CMT which is useful for developers and a pain for external users. It does a few things that configure does better, but allows one to gracefuly handle different versions of the same packege on a given system, and let every user chose its favorite blend.
  5. a CVS client to retrieve some parts of the software.
  6. Doxygen for generating the documentation. It exists as rpm or dpkg in corresponding repositories. You can download the source code from here
About the actual software packages we use:
  1. cfitsio. We encourage you to use the version we deliver. For quite a while, it had a few bug fixes which are now in the official releases. We did not test the poloka build procedure against a regular install of cfitsio.
  2. SExtractor. The version we deliver is slightly different from the official releases, because it allows us to use SExtractor as a library, which is not supported by the developers.
  3. Some minor parts of the code make use of cernlib, which is available as rpm's or pkg. The install script checks for an available cernlib.
So, to summarize:
  1. Check that you have g++ (with the libc headers and the STL), f77, libtools and cvs.
  2. We provide a script which, At least on Linux, will install CMT, retrieve cftisio and SExtractor from our software repository, and will install them, and finally will retrieve Poloka itself and compile it. Poloka is delivered as a tar file. autoconf related files are not provided because latest automake versions don't enable to build. Users having access to the poloka cvs repository should rather follow the instructions in the INSTALL file of the top directory.
  3. This automated procedure was not extensively tested (to say the least), so please let us know how it (mis-) behaves.
  4. The documentation is mainly in the code, and meant to be extracted by Doxygen. By default the main Makefile does not generate it. "cd doc;make" does the job, and you may then point your web browser to poloka/doc/html/ to get started.
Nicolas Regnault