GAP for Fedora
      Based on "GAP for Debian" by Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org>


GAP (http://www.gap-system.org) is a system for computational discrete
algebra.  Many add-on components ("packages") are available for GAP.  Most of
them not yet available from Fedora.  However, they can be installed locally in
any of the following locations:
  - /usr/local/share/gap/pkg
  - /usr/local/lib/gap/pkg
  - ~/gap/pkg

Some packages must be compiled.  The necessary tools are available in the
gap-devel package.

Saved Workspaces, or How to make GAP start faster
-------------------------------------------------

GAP starts slowly because it needs to parse all the libraries installed at
start up.  To make GAP start faster, it is possible to save the GAP workspace
and reload it at the next start up.  To support this, Fedora provides a
Debian-derived script, update-gap-workspace; see the the
update-gap-workspace(1) manual page.

Colors in the GAP shell
-----------------------

If you would like the GAP shell to display the prompt, input, etc. in color,
you can try colorprompt.g by Frank L├╝beck.  Add this line to ~/.gaprc:

ColorPrompt(true);

See /usr/lib/gap/lib/colorprompt.g for more information.

Browsing GAP Documentation
--------------------------

By default, GAP will display documentation in a terminal.  Other options are
available.  Insert one of the following into ~/.gaprc:

SetHelpViewer("firefox");   # Displays HTML documentation in Firefox
SetHelpViewer("konqueror"); # Displays HTML documentation in Konqueror
SetHelpViewer("lynx");      # Displays HTML documentation in Lynx
SetHelpViewer("w3m");       # Displays HTML documentation in w3m
SetHelpViewer("xdvi");      # Displays DVI documentation in xdvi
SetHelpViewer("xpdf");      # Displays PDF documentation in xpdf
SetHelpViewer("xdghtml");   # Displays HTML documentation using xdg-open
SetHelpViewer("xdgdvi");    # Displays DVI documentation using xdg-open
SetHelpViewer("xdgpdf");    # Displays PDF documentation using xdg-open

The last three are Fedora extensions.  They use xdg-open to open the
documentation files with the user's preferred applications.

Large GAP libraries are compressed
----------------------------------

To save disk space, the largest GAP libraries are compressed with gzip.  GAP
automatically decompresses them.

Supporting GAP
--------------

If you use GAP, please send a short note to support@gap-system.org stating you
use the Fedora packages of GAP so the GAP team can keep track of the number of
GAP users.  This helps them obtain funding for the project.