Getting Started

There are basically two ways to get Quilt - and most other open source software. The first is CVS, which gives you access to last night's version of the code. The second is to download the latest release. This is more likely to work, but is less up to date; current plans are to put out incremental Quilt 0.6a releases at roughly 2 week intervals.

Quilt is being developed on systems running Linux and FreeBSD. If you are working under a Microsoft operating system, you may need to use some initiative to get the advice that follows to work. We will try to improve on this situation; please be patient.

CVS Access

Quilt is hosted on SourceForge. On Unix systems, you can get a copy of the most recent version of Quilt by typing: 

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/quilt checkout quilt-dev

This will deliver the very latest version to your desktop, creating a quilt-dev subdirectory in the current directory.

If you are using another operating system, or have trouble with the instructions above, try Sourceforge's CVS documentation ; this is lucid and reasonably easy to follow.

Downloads

The alternative is downloading a tarball. This is very simple indeed. You should see a Download button at the top of this Web page; if you click on it, it will take you to Quilt's Sourceforge download page. The most recent tarballs will be listed towards the top. If you just want to use Quilt, get the binary distribution, which will have a name like quilt-0.6-a1-bin.tar.gz . If you want the source code, so that you can see how it works, you will need the source distribution, which has a name like quilt-0.6-a1-src.tar.gz .

Javadocs are included with the binary distribution and built by the source distribution.

Click on whichever you prefer, and your browser will get it for you.

Once you have the tarball, put it in the directory where you want your Quilt subdirectory and type 

  tar -vzxf quilt*gz

and it will be extracted for you. (These instructions are of course suitable for Linux/Unix hosts; if you are using Windows, you need to adjust appropriately.)

Where's the Jar?

Either of the procedures above will give you a distribution in a subdirectory with a name like quilt-0.6-a1 . If you have the binary distribution, in that directory you will find a Quilt jar; in this case it would be quilt-0.6-a1.jar . If you have the source distribution, you can build the jar by typing 

  ant jar

This will create a Quilt jar in the target subdirectory.

Confidence Building

You can now actually use Quilt by copying the Quilt jar into the example directory and then moving into one of the directories below hat. For example, the following commands will copy the jar, take you into the example/3x6 directory, and build and run the tests: 

  cp quilt*jar example
  cd example/3x6
  ant test

For Developers

Those with an interest in Quilt's inner workings are advised to get the software using CVS. There are currently several file changes a day.

Once you have the software, you should go into the base Quilt directory and run the tests. 

  cd quilt
  ant test

These should execute with no or very few errors. If you do see serious errors, it is likely that there are problems with the installation.

The most likely problems are classpath errors and missing jar files.