Contents:
---------

1. Copyright and contact information
2. Introduction
3. Installation


1. Copyright and contact information
-------------------------------------

Postgres Forms (pfm) is a client application for PostgreSQL.

Copyright © 2004-2013 Willem Herremans

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

A copy of the  GNU General Public License is included in the 'help'
subdirectory of this software package.

The home page of Postgres Forms (pfm) can be found at:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pfm/

There you can report bugs, request new features and get support.


2. Introduction
----------------

Postgres Forms (pfm) has been designed and tested on Linux. It may
work on other UNIXes as well. It has also been tested on Windows XP.

This is the source distribution: it does neither contain the Tclkit
binaries, nor the pgintcl interface to PostgreSQL. If you are looking
for a quick installation of pfm, you may be better off with the
binary distributions (pfm-x.y.x-linux-x86.tar.gz or
pfm-x.y.z-windows-32.exe)

To get Postgres Forms (pfm) running you need to have access to at
least one database on a PostgreSQL database server, which may be
running either on your machine, or on another machine that you can
access via TCP/IP. You also need the PostgreSQL client application
'psql' on your machine. See PostgreSQL documentation for details.

Postgres Forms has been designed and tested with PostgreSQL version
7.4.2, but it probably works with some older and newer versions as
well. It has also been tested with PostgreSQL 8.x and 9.0. You can
obtain PostgreSQL from http://www.postgresql.org.

pfm needs one of the packages: Pgtcl or pgintcl to communicate
with the PostgreSQL database server.

Pgtcl can be obtained from:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtcl/

or, the new generation Pgtcl, from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgtclng/

pgintcl can be obtained from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgintcl/

Notes:

    - The Pgtcl package offers better performance, but needs to be
      built, whereas the pgintcl package is just a Tcl script that can
      be called by pfm. Pgtcl is included in most Linux distributions,
      often with the package name "libpgtcl". In the case of pfm, the
      difference in performance between Pgtcl and pgintcl is hardly
      noticeable. Moreover, I have had problems with Pgtcl on some
      Linux distributions. So, I recommend using pgintcl.

    - If the pgin.tcl file is present in the installation directory,
      pfm sources it and does not attempt to load the Pgtcl package.

    - Alternatively, you can also install pgintcl as a Tcl package. Then
      pfm will also find and load it as a Tcl package.

From version 2.0.0. on Postgres Forms requires version 8.5 of Tcl/Tk.
It also needs the packages Itcl 3.4 and msgcat 1.4.2.

3. Installation
---------------

If you are looking for an easy installation of pfm, you may be better
off with the binary distributions pfm-x.y.z-linux-x86 or
pfm-x.y.z-windows-32.

This is the source only distribution. But since pfm is written in Tcl,
no compilation is required.

To get pfm running on your system, you can do the following:

1. Install Tcl/Tk 8.5 or higher.

2. Make sure you have the Tcl packages Itcl 3.4 or higher and msgcat
   1.4.2 or higher.

3. Copy all files and directories in this folder to where you want to
   install pfm (e.g. /usr/share/pfm). Alternatively, you can copy the
   subdirectories doc and license to other locations (e.g.
   /usr/share/doc/pfm and /usr/share/doc/licenses). In that case you
   also have to modify pfm.conf. You can keep pfm.conf in the
   installation directory (e.g. /usr/share/pfm) or you can move it to
   /etc.

4. Download pgintcl from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgintcl/

5. Copy the pgin.tcl script to the installation directory
   (e.g. /usr/share/pfm). Alternatively, you can install pgintcl as a
   Tcl package.

6. Make a pfm launch script in a directory in your PATH
   (e.g. /usr/bin/pfm). It should contain something like

   /usr/bin/tclsh /usr/share/pfm/pfm.tcl

7. Modify pfm-postgresforms.desktop as required. You can use it to make
   a desktop menu entry or a desktop icon, using the xdg-utils.


