3 Installing ¶

The following programs and libraries are required, see their respective documentation for installation instructions.

• Perl 5.10 or higher
  http://www.perl.org
• Gtk 2 libraries, version 2.12 or higher.
  http://www.gtk.org
• Gtk2-Perl, version 1.200 or higher.
  http://gtk2-perl.sourceforge.net
• The large number of Perl modules listed in Makefile.PL, all of which are available from CPAN,
  http://www.cpan.org

Chart uses an ExtUtils::MakeMaker build system. A basic build and install can be made as follows. This will install under ‘/usr/local’.

perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

The usual ExtUtils::MakeMaker options and build targets are available. Here are some other notes,

Optional Software

Various optional features and their required Perl modules are set out in the optional_features section of META.yml. Some of the smart Perl install tools might offer them in an automated way, otherwise look at META.yml or Makefile.PL and install desired things manually. The most interesting options include Finance::Quote (see Finance Quote), Genius Trader and TA-Lib (see Other Indicator Packages).

HTTP Compression

If suitable modules are available then LWP is set to request compression in HTTP downloads. Various servers will do this and it saves download size when the server does. Gzip is the most common and its decompression uses IO::Uncompress::Gunzip which comes with Perl so should be available always.

HTTPS ¶

For https protocol the LWP::Protocol::https module is required. In libwww 6 and up it comes separately and expresses its required supporting modules. In libwww 5 see its README.SSL on the recommended Crypt::SSLeay module (using OpenSSL). Many data sources need https, including Yahoo Finance.

Documentation ¶

The source for the manual you’re now reading is doc/chart.texi, in Texinfo format (see Texinfo in Texinfo).

HTML format chart.html is installed as lib/App/Chart/doc/chart.html with the source code. It can be viewed with the Help commands within Chart, or with any browser. The following make targets can build other formats,

make info      # Info
make dvi       # TeX DVI
make ps        # PostScript
make pdf       # PDF

producing files doc/chart.info, doc/chart.dvi, etc. They need enough of Chart’s Perl dependencies installed to run the doc/weights.pl script, then Info requires makeinfo (see Creating an Info File in Texinfo) and DVI, PS and PDF require various TeX and Texinfo tools. PDF also requires either epstopdf from Texlive or TeTeX, or ps2pdf from Ghostscript. makeinfo can produce other formats, including DocBook and XML (see Options for makeinfo in Texinfo).

Scrollkeeper ¶

A Scrollkeeper entry (http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net) doc/chart.omf is included for the manual (HTML form). It can be used by Gnome help (Yelp) and similar programs. Currently it’s not automatically installed but you can copy to /usr/share/omf/chart/chart.omf and run scrollkeeper-update.

User Directory ¶

The default directory for Chart downloaded data and configurations is ~/Chart, ie. a Chart subdirectory of the user’s home directory. The CHART_DIRECTORY environment variable can be set to a different directory if something else is preferred, or perhaps to experiment or keep some things separate.