Over time, each distribution has established one or more packages for SWI-Prolog independently based on their own conventions. As a result, nobody knows what SWI-Prolog is called and which packages to install. We are guilty of this as well by using the short pl as the default system name for a long time.

Names of the executables

We wish to use the name swipl on all installations. The system comes with a helper program named swipl-ld.

Directory hierarchy

The default installation of SWI-Prolog creates the following items:

<PREFIX>/lib/swipl-<version>

This is a completely self-contained hierarchy that supports multiple architectures. Please do not split this. Almost all directories are searched relative to this directory or documented as located relative to this directory. Note that the doc directory is used by the help and documentation system.

<PREFIX>/bin/swipl, swipl-ld

These binaries are relative symbolic links into the tree above. Do not rename these as the link information is used to find the above hierarchy. This keeps the package relocatable, and this very same mechanism can be used to create relocatable applications from SWI-Prolog.

<PREFIX>/man/man1/swipl.1, swipl-ld.1

The standard Unix manpages. These files are localized based on the installation directories.

Making multiple packages

We would like to see that the default SWI-Prolog package installs the same development environment on every system. The default top level configure and make build all the packages we consider essential or small enough to include anyway. Debian likes small packages and we came to the following division:

swi-prolog-nox

Contains the core compiler and all standard libraries that do not introduce major new dependencies.

swi-prolog-x

Contains XPCE, the graphical front-end

swi-prolog-odbc

Contains the ODBC interface

swi-prolog-java

Contains the Java interface (JPL).

swi-prolog-doc

Contains all documentation

The package swi-prolog depends on swi-prolog-nox and swi-prolog-x, providing a good default system that does not introduce many dependencies on a standard workstation environment. See also Debian.md.

Building

Building follows standard CMake procedures. The system can be built using Profile Guided Optimization (PGO), which makes it about 7% faster. To do so

1. Configure cmake using the Ninja build tool (-G Ninja)
2. Run ../script/pgo-compile.sh
3. Run Ninja

Patches

If you need patches that are not really specific to your distro, such as incomplete cleanup in make distclean, missing DESTROOT or portability issues, please send them to mailto:bugs@swi-prolog.org.