[Gretl-users] Building gretl from CVS on Linux

Hello all, This may or may not be relevant to the problem recently reported by Artur T., but I'll set it out for the record. 1) If you install gretl using the package management system of a Linux distribution, it will almost certainly be installed under /usr -- the gretl executables in /usr/bin, the gretl shared library in /usr/lib, and data files and so on in /usr/share/gretl. 2) But if you build the program yourself, the default (as per the GNU standard) is to install under /usr/local -- the executables in /usr/local/bin, the library in /usr/local/lib, and shared files under /usr/local/share/gretl. 3) Unfortunately, this creates the potential -- for anyone not used to managing a Linux system -- for a nasty mix-up of incompatible bits and pieces. 4) We therefore recommend that if you're building gretl yourself (a) you should ensure that you uninstall completely the gretl version installed by your distribution (if present), and (b) to avoid the possibility of ending up with parallel versions, you may want to configure the gretl build with --prefix=/usr . That way, if anything remains from a stock installation it will be overwritten by files from your CVS build. 5) If you're switching from packaged gretl to your own build, an additional safety measure is to delete your old per-user gretl config file, and let this be re-established: rm -f ~/.gretl2rc -- Allin Cottrell Department of Economics Wake Forest University