Rasqal requires the Raptor RDF parser toolkit version 1.3.0 or later for parsing RDF, retrieving WWW content and other utility classes and libraries. It can also use Redland as an alternate triple store and enabled by --with-triples-source=redland as described below however Raptor is also required.
The sources are available from http://librdf.org/dist/source/ (master site) and also from the SourceForge site.
Note that using this rather than the bundles may require having some extra development tools. Presently this includes the flex scanner generator version 2.5.31 or later.
# sh, bash, ... CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.librdf.org:/cvsroot export CVSROOT # csh, tcsh, ... setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anonymous@cvs.librdf.org:/cvsroot cvs login Logging in to :pserver:anonymous@cvs.librdf.org:2401/cvsroot CVS password: [return] cvs checkout redland/rasqal cd redland/rasqal
At this stage, or after a cvs update you will
need to create the automake and autoconf derived files, as described
below in Create the configure program
by using the autogen.sh
script.
Building Rasqal in this way requires some particular development
tools not needed when building from snapshot releases - automake and
autoconf. The autogen.sh
script looks for the newest
versions of the auto* tools and checks that they meet the minimum
versions.
Requirements: the Raptor RDF parser toolkit version 1.3.0 or later (plus flex and bison as specified above, when building from CVS). Recommended: PCRE regex library or another implementing the POSIX regex API. If neither is present some of the tests will fail and the query engine will fail to handle regex matches.
Rasqal is developed and built on x86 GNU/Linux (Redhat 9, Debian unstable) but is also regularly tested on sparc Sun Solaris 2.x, x86 FreeBSD 4.8, ppc Apple OSX 10.2 and as part of Redland on several other systems via the SourceForge compile farm (AMD IA64 SuSE 8 Linux 2.4, Alpha Debian Linux 2.2).
configure
programIf there is no configure program, you can create it using the autogen.sh script, as long as you have the automake and autoconf tools. This is done by:
aclocal; autoheader; automake --add-missing; autoconf
and you can also pass along arguments intended for configure (see below for what these are):
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local/somewhere
Alternatively you can run them by hand with:
aclocal; autoheader; automake --add-missing; autoconf
The automake and autoconf tools have many different versions and at present development is being done with automake 1.8.3 (minimum version 1.7), autoconf 2.59 (minimum version 2.54) and libtool 1.5.4 (minimum version 1.4). These are only needed when compiling from CVS sources. autogen.sh enforces the requirements. In future development will move to require automake 1.8, autoconf 2.58 and libtool 1.5.
Rasqal also supports the following extra configure options:
Pick the RDF query languages to build from the list:
rdql sparqal
The default when this option is omitted is to enable all query languages.
Pick a regex library to use - either pcre (default) for the PCRE or posix a POSIX regex implementation in the C library
Pick a triples source library to use - either raptor (default, and always available) or redland to use Redland. Raptor creates a simple in-store list of triples on parsing each time whereas Redland makes a much more efficient indexed in-memory store. See also --with-redland-config.
Set the path to the PCRE pcre-config program
--with-raptor=
system
or internal
This option tells Rasqal to use either the system installed version
of raptor or a version in the sibling directory of ../raptor
If the option is omittted, Rasqal will guess and choose either the
system one, if new enough or the internal one if present. If
--with-raptor=system
is used and Rasqal discovers that
the system raptor is too old, a warning will be given but the
configuration will continue.
Set the path to the Redland redland-config program
If everything is in the default place, do:
./configure
The most common configuration you will be doing something like this:
./configure --prefix=/usr
Compile the library with;
make
Note: GNU make is probably required so it may be gmake or gnumake on your system
You can build and run the built-in test suite with:
make check
which should emit lots of exciting test messages to the screen but
conclude with something like:
All n tests passed
if everything works correctly. There might be some regex
tests that fail if no POSIX regex library was available when
raptor was compiled
...
The public Rasqal API is described in the librasqal.3 UNIX manual/web page
Copyright 2003-2004 Dave Beckett, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol