(C)2007-2008 by Marc Roeder, 
National University of Ireland, Galway


          polymak(e)inG(AP)
         ==================

A very basic GAP-interface to the program "polymake" by
Ewgenij Gawrilow and Michael Joswig which is available at
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/polymake/

Note that this package does not provide the program "polymake", which
has to be installed separately.

This package is distributed under the terms of the GNU general public license version 2 or later (at your descretion).

       	    	Requirements
		------------
polymaking requires GAP version 4.4. It also needs polymake to be installed.
The GAPDoc package is needed to display the documentation.

		Installation
		------------
0. Install polymake (http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/polymake/)

1. Download one of the archives
	polymaking<ver>.tar.bz2 
	polymaking<ver>.tar.gz
	polymaking<ver>.zoo
	polymaking<ver>-win.zip

   (where <ver> is some version number) to the directory pkg/ of the 
   GAP home directory. If you do not have permission to do so, create 
   a directory called gap/pkg in your home directory.

2. change directory to pkg/ and unpack the archive using the according command:
	tar -xjf polymaking<ver>.tar.bz2
	tar -xzf polymaking<ver>.tar.gz
	zoo -extract polymaking<ver>.zoo 
	unzip polymaking<ver>-win.zip

 (replace <ver> with the version number)

3. tell GAP where to look for polymake by adding these lines to your .gaprc file:
   POLYMAKE_COMMAND:=Filename(Directory("/home/mypolymakebindir/"),"polymake");
   MakeImmutable(POLYMAKE_COMMAND);
   Note that you can also modify the value of the variable in lib/environment.gi.

3. start GAP. If you have created the directory gap/pkg in your home 
   directory, use "gap -l '<homedir>/gap;'" where <homedir> is the path of
   your home directory (use "pwd" to find out what it is, if you don't know)

4. Type "LoadPackage("polymaking");" to load  polymaking package



			IMPORTANT NOTE!
			===============

Please help me extend/improve/debug polymaking!

Not all polymake keywords/properties are yet converted into GAP
language by polymaking. If you want to use one of those, please tell
me about it.  

Also, if you find the conversion output for some keyword inconsistent
or wrong the reason is probably that I never used this keyword in the
context you do. For some keywords, the method for conversion was
actually guessed.

So if you find a bug or strange behaviour, please write a bug report to 
marc_roeder@web.de.

Thanks,
marc