Installation
------------

Instructions for installation from a distribution tarball.  We'll
assume that you've downloaded a tarball whose name is something like
"bigfloat-0.2.tar.gz".  The exact version number may differ; just
substitute the real version number everywhere that "0.2" appears in
what follows.

(1) Unpack the tarball with something like:

  tar -zxvf bigfloat-0.2.tar.gz

This should create a directory bigfloat-0.2/ containing a setup.py
script and the rest of the bigfloat source.

(2) Enter the created directory, and execute the command

  python setup.py install

from the bigfloat-0.2/ directory.  For a site-wide installation, you
may need to become superuser, or use the 'sudo' command.

(3) (Optional).  Test the installation by doing:

  python -m bigfloat.test.test_bigfloat

If installation was successful, the bigfloat-0.2/ directory that you
created can now be deleted.


Prerequisites
-------------

This package requires Python 2.5 or later.  The MPFR and GMP libraries will
need to be already installed on your system.

The bigfloat module will attempt to find the MPFR library on your
system at import time.  If it fails to find the library, or if you
have multiple copies of the MPFR library on your system and setup.py
finds the wrong one, you can edit the bigfloat_config.py file to
specify the location of the MPFR library on your system directly.

You may also need to edit this file if the MPFR or GMP libraries were
built using a non-standard configuration.
