[GAP Forum] GAP minimal installation

[Alexander Konovalov]

Dear Pierre-Alain,

On 6 May 2014, at 16:24, Pierre-Alain BOURDIL <pabourdi at laas.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
> i'd like to compile GAP with the minimal possible setup, ie with smallest possible set of packages.
> I did not find any option in the configure to select the packages to be installed.

GAP distribution is supplied together with packages, so one need not to select them for installation. Packages that do not require compilation will be available immediately, while some packages have to be compiled, e.g. using the script available from http://www.gap-system.org/Download/install.html. 

Now, to use GAP, one must have the package called GAPDoc, otherwise GAP won't start. Indeed, GAP will work without all other packages. However, there are some packages which extend GAP essentially, and it may be not a useful idea to remove them from a GAP installation. These packages may be used in the background e.g. to factorise integers or to compute automorphism groups, sometimes without even notifying the user that a package had been used. 

May I ask you why are you interested in such minimalistic installation - is it a matter of a disk space, or not being able to compile some packages (e.g. under OS X) or too time-consuming package compiling process (e.g. on Raspberry Pi), or anything else? Which kinds of calculations are expected to run in such GAP installation?

> Is there some docs about customizing the GAP install ?

Perhaps you may look at http://www.gap-system.org/Download/INSTALL which is also contained in the root directory of your GAP installation.

Hope this helps
Alexander