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XML-RPC for C/C++ (Xmlrpc-c) is developed and distributed by a
Sourceforge project.
The most normal way to get Xmlrpc-c is to get the source package
and build it for the particular system on which you want to run it.
Xmlrpc-c has a sophisticated, rather novel system of releasing
source code (see Release System), but you
probably don't need to know any more than the following to download
Xmlrpc-c.
No matter how you get the Xmlrpc-c source code, you have to
build it, following instructions and using tools in the
package, before you can install and use it. The procedure for this is
fairly standard for Unix source distributions, and is described in the
file README in the source package. For Windows, it takes a
little more imagination, but you can find instructions and tools in
the Windows directory in the source package.
The source code packages do not contain documentation.
The documentation is online, and if you want a local
copy, you can download it from that webserver (for example, with the
program wget).
At any particular time, there are 3 Xmlrpc-c releases from which to
choose:
| Series name
| Bugs
| Features
| How to download
|
| Super Stable
| Very few
| many years old
| Conventional source code tarball from Sourceforge
|
| Stable
| Few
| up to 2 years old
| Subversion
|
| Advanced
| Many
| up to 1/4 year old
| Subversion
|
Note that none of these releases have any known
bugs. The bugs are those that haven't been reported yet.
Downloading A Tarball
Get the tarball for the current Super Stable release from
Sourceforge.
This is a highly conventional Unix source code package. Use the
conventional Unix program tar to unpack it. It is Gzipped.
Downloading From Subversion
Downloading from Subversion is not a common way to get a release of
software, but it is very easy. You need a Subversion client program
to do it, but even that is not hard to get, and you may well find
other uses for a Subversion client later.
If you don't even know what Subversion is: It's a
replacement for CVS. If you don't know what CVS is: It's a system
designed for tracking changes to code as people develop it.
Subversion is primarily intended to be used by developers, but works
well as a release tool as well.
If you need a tarball of an Xmlrpc-c release, it is easy to
make one once you've downloaded the code from Subversion. Easy enough
that a simple program could do the download and create it.
The reason Xmlrpc-c uses this nontraditional method of distributing
code is that it saves work for the Xmlrpc-c maintainer. In some cases,
it shifts work from the maintainer to the user. In others, it actually
eliminates work.
If you don't have Subversion installed on your system (type
svn at a shell prompt to find out), see Getting Subversion for information on
getting it.
The URL of the Xmlrpc-c Subversion repository is
http://xmlrpc-c.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xmlrpc-c. So to download
the current Advanced release:
REPOS=http://xmlrpc-c.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xmlrpc-c/advanced
svn checkout $REPOS xmlrpc-c
That puts the source tree in a directory called xmlrpc-c in
your current directory.
To download the current Stable release, replace "advanced" with
"stable" in the above command.
Browsing
You can browse the source code one file at a time with
Sourceforge's Subversion
web access.
Pre-Built Distributions
Many system packagers (OS suppliers) provide pre-built (binary)
packages. They're typically made from older source code and have more
bugs, but it is usually far easier to install one of these than to build
your own.
After you download XML-RPC for C/C++, you may also want to sign up
for the
xmlrpc-c-announce mailing list. Other mailing
lists are also available.
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