Thuban - a Geographic Data Viewer
=================================

$Date$
$Revision$

Thuban is an interactive viewer for geographic data.  
Python and the wxWidgets framework ensure great portability.
Thuban is Free Software and runs on GNU/Linux, Windows 
and several other operating systems.

Homepage: 			https://thuban.intevation.org
Development infrastructure:  	https://wald.intevation.org/projects/thuban/


About the Name
--------------

Thuban is the name of a star in the constellation Draco (The Dragon).
About 4000 years ago it was the north star.


Installation
------------
As with most software there are two ways to install Thuban:
a) Use a prepared package specific for your operating system.
   This is the most convenient way. The packager will have the instructions
   how to do this in detail, this is why it is not further described here.
   A decent package management system will also handle the requirements.

b) Build and install the software manually from sources.

Requirements for building and running Thuban.
------------

Thuban requires the following software to be installed:

  Python     2.3.5    http://www.python.org
  wxWidgets  2.6.3.2  http://www.wxwidgets.org (formerly known as wxWindows)
  wxPython   2.6.3.2  http://www.wxpython.org
  proj       4.4.5    http://www.remotesensing.org/proj/
  SQLite     2.8.3    http://sqlite.org/
  PySQLite   1.0.1    http://pysqlite.org/

The versions given are the lowest versions that are known to work. for
proj, sqlite and pysqlite somewhat older versions probably work as well.
Note that the wxPython version must be the same as the wxWidgets version
(Some wxPython binary packages already contain the right wxWidgets version)

Optional software:

  GDAL       1.3.2  http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal/
     for raster image (geo-tiff) support

  psycopg    2.0.x  http://initd.org/software/psycopg
     for postgis connections. Newer version probably also work

  RXP        1.2.x  http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/rxp.html
     usually comes directly with pyRXP.
  pyRXP      0.9    http://www.reportlab.org/pyrxp.html
     only for the automatic tests to validate Thuban's XML files.

Note that extensions might have their own additional requirements.


Building and installing
-----------------------

(First make sure the development variants of the software listed
in the "Requirements" section above is installed.)

Building Thuban (this compiles the extension modules but leaves them in
a directory under build/):

   python setup.py build


To setup Thuban to run directly from the source directory:

   python setup.py install_local

You can run this without running build first.


To install Thuban:

   python setup.py install


for general information about the command line options of the setup.py
script, run

   python setup.py --help


If you build from SVN and want to have translated menus, dialogs etc.
you have to build the message catalogs manually before you run setup.py.
See po/README for more information.

There are a number of automated tests that will check a great
deal of Thuban's funcationality. See test/README for details.
You should consider running them.

Thuban has a nice manual, go to the "Doc/manual" and try "make".


Build Troubleshooting
---------------------

When building Thuban, you might have problems because of a missing file
wx/wxPython/wxPython.h.  This file is part of wxPython and may be
packaged in a separate package.  Unfortunately, on some systems this
file is not packaged at all.  On those systems you can try a work-around
built into Thuban, by passing the --use-wx-python-swig-hack to the
build_ext command.  This can be done on the command line for the build
command like this:

   python setup.py  build_ext --use-wx-python-swig-hack  build

You can also use it with the install_local command:

   python setup.py  build_ext --use-wx-python-swig-hack  install_local

Note, that this work-around relies on some wxPython internals and may
cease to work at some point.  We tested it with wxPython 2.6.


Packaging
---------

Dear packager, 
in order to improve the quality of Thuban, 
the automatic tests suite should be run when Thuban is build.
This is especially interesting when building is done automatically.
Please check out the test/README how to do this.
Releasenotes.txt and the Doc/technotes/release-process.txt 
might also contain interesting hints.

Since Thuban 1.2.1 there is a file thuban_cfg.py which can be used
for the installation wide configuration of Thuban. By default it enables
all interesting extensions. Administrators should edit this files to their
need, e.g. when they want to not show some extensions by default.

Choose a format of the manual you want to install with the package.

License
-------

Thuban is licensed under the terms of the 
GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

However, some of the extension modules in the extension subdirectory are
licensed under other Free Software licenses. 
See the respective README files for details.