Patch Installer Notes

The patch install script looks for a patch history file (ie. patch_hist120500.dat) in the user's Xspec/src directory. If it can't find one it assumes no patches have been applied and will therefore apply the entire patch list. Otherwise, it determines the previously applied patches and applies only the new ones.

The patch tar file (name begins with Xspatch_) contains the code files for all of the patches along with a map file which contains the instructions for applying the particular patches. The patch tar file is copied and expanded into a temporary working directory which will be removed before the script ends. If an error causes the script to exit prematurely, it's possible that the temporary directory (name begins with "xspatchTmp") will not be removed. This is unimportant though, you can leave it or remove it and it won't affect the installer next time it's run.

After the installer finishes, you can either keep or remove the the patch tar file. If the installer finds more than one patch tar file in your directory , it will use the one with the most recent version. The installer will also create a patch.log file primarily for diagnostic purposes.

Beginning with installer v3.0, the following command line flags are available (and may also be entered in abbreviated form):

-help	Show available options
-models	Use only for patching stand-alone model library distribution of xspec.
-no_build	Only copy the patch files, do not build (this will not update the patch history file).

If the script fails in its attempt to unzip and untar the patch tar file, you made need to modify the tar command for your particular system. This is set at the top of the patch_install.tcl script with the variables "untarCmd" and "untarFlgs." Their default setting will produce "tar zxvf" as the unzip/untar command.