(C)2007-2013 by Marc Roeder, 
National University of Ireland, Galway


          polymak(e)inG(AP)
         ==================

A very basic GAP-interface to the program "polymake" by
Ewgenij Gawrilow and Michael Joswig which is available at
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/polymake/

Note that this package does not provide the program "polymake", which
has to be installed separately.

This package is distributed under the terms of the GNU general public
license version 2 or later (at your descretion).


       	    	Requirements
		------------
 polymaking requires GAP version 4.4. It also needs polymake to be
installed.  The GAPDoc package is needed to display the documentation.
polymaking was written for the "first generation" polymake which was
called as a command-line tool. Using it with a current ("next generation")
version of polymake will result in longer runtimes and fewer supported
keywords/features. 


		Installation
		------------
0. Install polymake (http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/polymake/)

1. Download one of the archives
	polymaking<ver>.tar.bz2 
	polymaking<ver>.tar.gz
	polymaking<ver>.zoo
	polymaking<ver>-win.zip
   (where <ver> is some version number) to the directory pkg/ of the 
   GAP home directory. If you do not have permission to do so, create 
   a directory called gap/pkg in your home directory.

2. change directory to pkg/ and unpack the archive using the according command:
	tar -xjf polymaking<ver>.tar.bz2
	tar -xzf polymaking<ver>.tar.gz
	zoo -extract polymaking<ver>.zoo 
	unzip polymaking<ver>-win.zip
 (replace <ver> with the version number)

3. start GAP. If you have created the directory gap/pkg in your home 
   directory, use "gap -l '<homedir>/gap;'" where <homedir> is the path of
   your home directory (use "pwd" to find out what it is, if you don't know)

4. Type "LoadPackage("polymaking");" to load  polymaking package

5. Run "ReadPackage("polymaking","tst/test.gap");" for a quick test

If polymake is not found automatically (a warning will be printed at 
level 1 in this case), try this:

6. Tell GAP where to look for polymake by adding the following lines to 
   your .gaprc file:
   POLYMAKE_COMMAND:=Filename(Directory("/home/mypolymakebindir/"),"polymake");
   MakeImmutable(POLYMAKE_COMMAND);
   Note that you can also modify the value of the variable in 
   lib/environment.gi.



			IMPORTANT NOTE!
			===============

Please help me extend/improve/debug polymaking!

Not all polymake keywords/properties are yet converted into GAP
language by polymaking. If you want to use one of those, please tell
me about it.  

Also, if you find the conversion output for some keyword inconsistent
or wrong the reason is probably that I never used this keyword in the
context you do. For some keywords, the method for conversion was
actually guessed.

So if you find a bug or strange behaviour, please send a bug report to 
roeder.marc@gmail.com .

Thanks,
marc

