			    IO_LIB VERSION 1.8.11
			    =====================

Io_lib is a library of file reading and writing code to provide a general
purpose trace file (and Experiment File) reading interface. The programmer
simply calls the (eg) read_reading to create a "Read" C structure with the
data loaded into memory. It has been compiled and tested on:

Solaris 2.6
Compaq Tru64 Unix 4.0E (formerly Digital Unix)
RedHat Linux 7.1

In addition to the above, the code has previously (but not tested with this
release) been compiled and used on a Mac and MS Windows NT.

The directories below here contain the io_lib code. These support the
following file formats:

	SCF trace files
	ABI trace files
	ALF trace files
	CTF trace files
	Experiment files
	Plain text files
	ZTR trace files

In addition, a library is used for bringing all these together into a single
library so that only a single function call (read_reading or write_reading)
is required to access the file, regardless of the file type it uses. See the
file include/Read.h for the generic 'Read' structure.


Unix - autoconf
---------------

We now have a GNU autoconf build mechanism, but this is not without problems
(mainly the difficulty in debugging and development when using libtool and the
lack of MS Windows support). It's much easier for general building though.

To build:

1. ./configure

"./configure --help" will give a list of the options for GNU autoconf. For
modifying the compiler options or flags you may wish to redefine the CC or
CFLAGS variable.

Eg (in sh or bash):
   CC=cc CFLAGS=-g ./configure

2. make (or gmake)

This will build the sources.

3. make install

The default installation location is /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib. These
can be changed with the --prefix option to "configure".



Mailing list
------------

A mailing list allowing discussion of io_lib has been set up. To subscribe
send a message to listmanager@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk with "subscribe iolib-list" in 
the body of the mail.
To post messages send mail to iolib-list@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk.

The list is unmoderated, so if you value a high signal to noise ratio (ie no
SPAM) then please do not post the list mail address to a newsgroup or WWW
page.


History
-------
				    
See CHANGES file

