Hello, and welcome to the Ledger source code!

If you're reading this file, you have in your hands the Bleeding Edge.
This may very well *NOT* be what you want, since it's not guaranteed to
be in a functionally complete state.  It's under active development, and
may change in any way at any time.

What you may prefer is the current stable release, or the current beta
branch.  At this moment, you can get there by one of two commands:

  BETA:     git checkout -b v2.6.1b origin/v2.6.1b

The BETA is what I prefer people use, since I still have a change to fix
major bugs that you find.  Just log them in the track against 2.6.1 and
they'll become a part of my work list.

  RELEASE:  git checkout v2.6.0.90

This is the same release code that you can download via tarball from the
home page.  It has some serious issues dealing with date/time handling,
although at least its major flaws are mostly known by now.

You can jump over to the current active development at any time by using
this command:

  DEVEL:    git checkout master

There are also several topic branches which contain experimental
features, although none of these are guaranteed even to compile.  Best
to chat with me on IRC or via the mailing list before going too much
further with those.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now, if you wish to proceed in this venture, you'll need a few
dependencies:

  - PCRE 7.7          -- if you're building BETA or RELEASE

  - Boost 1.35        -- if you're building DEVEL
  - CppUnit 1.12.1    -- if you're building DEVEL

  - Optionally, Python 2.4 or higher
  - Optionally, libexpat or libxml2
  - Optionally, libofx

For the convenience of my fellow developers on the master (DEVEL)
branch, you may download some of these dependencies quite easily right
here and now.  Just run this command:

  git submodule update --init

You'll now have a few extra source trees in lib/.  There's even a
Makefile there, which will build and install Boost and CppUnit into the
appropriate places in /usr/local/stow.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next step is preparing your environment for building.  While you can
just use 'autoreconf -fi', I've prepared a script that does a lot of the
footwork for you:

  ./acprep

If you want to run with complete debugging on, as I do, use this:

  ./acprep --devel

Please read the contents of 'acprep' in this case, especially the
section which documents the --devel option.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once you have the dependencies installed and the source prepared for
building, just run 'make'.  If you have CppUnit installed, I prefer that
you always run 'make fullcheck', as this will verify Ledger against the
unit tests, the Python unit tests (if applicable), and the regression
tests, for your platform.

If you have extra CPU cycles to burn, try even 'make distcheck', which
provides the most thorough shakedown of a healthy source tree.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now that you're up and running, here are a few resources to keep in
mind:

  Home page              http://www.newartisans.com/software/ledger.html

  IRC channel		 #ledger on irc.freenode.net
  Mailing List / Forum   http://groups.google.com/group/ledger-cli
  Issue Tracker          http://trac.newartisans.com/ledger
  GitHub project page    http://github.com/jwiegley/ledger/tree/master
  Buildbot display	 http://www.newartisans.com:9090
  Ohloh code analysis	 http://www.ohloh.net/projects/ledger

If you have coding ideas you want to share, the best way is either to
e-mail me a patch (I prefer ttachments over pasted text), or to get an
account on GitHub.  Once you do, fork the Ledger project, hack as much
as you like, then send me a message via GitHub asking me to check out
your repository.  I'm only too happy to do so for anyone who takes time
out of their schedule to help the Ledger project.

John