README

FAC is a software package for the calculation of various atomic processes,
written by Ming Feng Gu at the Space Science Laboratory of Berkeley.

cFAC was started around 2010 (based on FAC-1.1.1, released in 2006), initially
focusing on providing large volumes of data as required, e.g., for
collisional-radiative plasma modeling, and eliminating reliance upon third-party
Fortran numerical libraries with their C equivalents (hence the change in the
package name). See ChangeLog for details. The original file, documenting
development up to version 1.1.1, is kept as doc/ChangeLog.MFG.

Recently, Ming Feng Gu kindly agreed to release the FAC sources under the GPL
(version 3 or higher) license, and the repository is currently made public on
GitHub, <https://github.com/flexible-atomic-code/fac>.

Some bits of the FAC sources, which are still used in cFAC, were published in
the Computer Physics Communications journal, and as such, are licensed for
non-profit or academic use only, please see
<http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/licence/licence.html>.

In order to compile in these CPC-licensed modules, you need to pass the
"--with-cpc-modules" configure flag and explicitly agree to the CPC licensing
terms. Please note that as a result, the "sfac" executable will not be
redistributable!

Prerequisites:
1) C and FORTRAN compilers (such as gcc and gfortran).
2) The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) <http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/>,
   version 1.15 or above (earlier versions will NOT work).
3) The SQLite software library <http://www.sqlite.org/>.

Note: If you install the above software using a package manager of your OS, make
      sure you select the development packages (*-dev*).
      For example, in Debian/Ubuntu, do
      "sudo apt-get install gcc gfortran libgsl0-dev libsqlite3-dev".

4) In addition, if compiling a snapshot from GitHub (strongly not recommended
   for "production" calculations), GNU Automake, help2man, and a fairly
   complete LaTeX installation will be required.

Installation:
1) Get the latest _release_ from <https://github.com/fnevgeny/cfac/releases>.
   The filename should be like cfac-1.6.2.tar.gz. Unpack it and change to the
   newly created directory.
2) ./configure
Note 1: Specify --prefix=my/dir, if the default /usr/local is not what you 
        want.
Note 2: Use the "--with-extrainc" and "--with-extralib" options if the
        third-party libraries are not installed in the default system place.
Note 3: Run ./configure --help for more options.

3) make

4) make check
This will run a test suite of demo scripts and compare output against
"reference" results. Please report any failure.

5) make install
This installs the "sfac" executable and manual, as well as the CFACDB library,
C header file, and utility.

Usage:
The "sfac" executable accepts an input file as its only argument. See the "demo"
directory for examples. For more details, please read the manual, and be sure to
read the FAQ section of it.

Evgeny Stambulchik
Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics
Faculty of Physics
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot 7610001
Israel