Apache Portable Runtime Library (APR)
-------------------------------------
The Apache Portable Runtime Library provides a predictable and
consistent interface to underlying platform-specific
implementations, with an API to which software developers may code
and be assured of predictable if not identical behavior regardless
of the platform on which their software is built, relieving them of
the need to code special-case conditions to work around or take
advantage of platform-specific deficiencies or features.
APR and its companion libraries are implemented entirely in C
and provide a common programming interface across a wide variety
of operating system platforms without sacrificing performance.
Currently supported platforms include:
UNIX variants
Windows
Netware
Mac OS X
OS/2
To give a brief overview, the primary core
subsystems of APR 1.3 include the following:
Atomic operations
Dynamic Shared Object loading
File I/O
Locks (mutexes, condition variables, etc)
Memory management (high performance allocators)
Memory-mapped files
Multicast Sockets
Network I/O
Shared memory
Thread and Process management
Various data structures (tables, hashes, priority queues, etc)
For a more complete list, please refer to the following URLs:
http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr/modules.html
Users of APR 0.9 should be aware that migrating to the APR 1.x
programming interfaces may require some adjustments; APR 1.x is
neither source nor binary compatible with earlier APR 0.9 releases.
Users of APR 1.x can expect consistent interfaces and binary backwards
compatibility throughout the entire APR 1.x release cycle, as defined
in our versioning rules:
http://apr.apache.org/versioning.html
APR is already used extensively by the Apache HTTP Server
version 2 and the Subversion revision control system, to
name but a few. We list all known projects using APR at
http://apr.apache.org/projects.html -- so please let us know
if you find our libraries useful in your own projects!
Using a Subversion Checkout on Unix
===================================
If you are building APR from SVN, you need to perform a prerequisite
step. You must have autoconf, libtool and python installed for this
to work. The prerequisite is simply;
./buildconf
If you are building APR from a distribution tarball, buildconf is
already run for you, and you do not need autoconf, libtool or python
installed or to run buildconf unless you have patched APR's buildconf
inputs (such as configure.in, build.conf, virtually any file within
the build/ tree, or you add or remove source files).
Remember when updating from svn that you must rerun ./buildconf again
to effect any changes made to the build schema in your fresh update.
Configuring and Building APR on Unix
====================================
Simply;
./configure --prefix=/desired/path/of/apr
make
make test
make install
Configure has additional options, ./configure --help will offer you
those choices. You may also add CC=compiler CFLAGS="compiler flags"
etc. prior to the ./configure statement (on the same line). Please
be warned, some flags must be passed as part of the CC command,
itself, in order for autoconf to make the right determinations. Eg.;
CC="gcc -m64" ./configure --prefix=/desired/path/of/apr
will inform APR that you are compiling to a 64 bit CPU, and autoconf
must consider that when setting up all of APR's internal and external
type declarations.
For more verbose output from testall, you may wish to invoke testall
with the flag;
cd test
./testall -v
Building APR RPM files on Linux
===============================
Run the following to create SRPMs:
rpmbuild -ts apr-<version>.tar.bz2
rpmbuild -ts apr-util-<version>.tar.bz2
Run the following to create RPMs (or build from the SRPMs):
rpmbuild -tb apr-<version>.tar.bz2
rpmbuild -tb apr-util-<version>.tar.bz2
Resolve dependencies as appropriate.
Configuring and Building APR on Windows
=======================================
Using Visual Studio, you can build and run the test validation of APR.
The Makefile.win make file has a bunch of documentation about it's
options, but a trivial build is simply;
nmake -f Makefile.win
nmake -f Makefile.win PREFIX=c:\desired\path\of\apr install
Note you must manually modify the include\apr.hw file before you
build to change default options, see the #define APR_HAS_... or the
#define APR_HAVE_... statements. Be careful, many of these aren't
appropriate to be modified. The most common change is
#define APR_HAVE_IPV6 1
rather than 0 if this build of APR will be used strictly on machines
with the IPv6 adapter support installed.
It's trivial to include the apr.dsp (for a static library) or the
libapr.dsp (for a dynamic library) in your own build project, or you
can load apr.dsw in Visual Studio 2002 (.NET) or later, which will
convert these for you into apr.sln and associated .vcproj files.
When using APR as a dynamic library, nothing special is required,
simply link to libapr.lib. To use it as a static library, simply
define APR_DECLARE_STATIC before you include any apr header files
in your source, and link to apr.lib instead.
Generating Test Coverage information with gcc
=============================================
If you want to generate test coverage data, use the following steps:
./buildconf
CFLAGS="-fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage" ./configure
make
cd test
make
./testall
cd ..
make gcov
