How is Tophat installed?

Question

[from the mountains]

I'm trying to install Tophat. The manual says to use the following command:

./configure --prefix=/path/to/tophat_base_dir \
 --with-boost=/path/to/boost_prefix_dir

But there is no configure file in the packages in either the linux or mac distributions. What am I missing? and why am I having so much trouble installing boost as well on either OS?

[Ram]

If you're on a Mac, I hope you have homebrew installed. That makes installing any piece of software as easy as brew install package_name

[from the mountains]

i did try that, but had some failures nonetheless, even using --universal. I got it working on linux though (will post what I did below).

[Ram]

Tackle the failures and get homebrew working fine. It will pay off exponentially. Use this as a resource: https://www.topbug.net/blog/2013/04/14/install-and-use-gnu-command-line-tools-in-mac-os-x/

[p.senadheera]

when I try to install tophat2 with boost in Mac OSX 10.10.5 gave following error

I used the source code of tophat. boost was installed in BOOST-installed.

tophat-2.1.1 psenadheera$ ./configure --prefix=/Users/psenadheera/tophat-2.1.1  \ --with-boost= /Users/psenadheera/Boost_installed 

configure: error: invalid variable name: ` --with-boost'

Can you please help me to sort out this issue?

[Ram]

I'd highly recommend using homebrew when you're on OS X.

Answer 1

[from the mountains]

I installed the source file of tophat instead and was able to find the ./configure file.

As far as boost, even though the bootstrap.sh file gave the prefix as /usr/local, it didn't seem to be installing there. so as input I put in a new prefix: ./bootstrap.sh --prefix=<new-directory>

Thanks everyone for the input. hopefully I get better at all this!

Answer 2

[Sean Davis]

I'd suggest using a binary installation. Binaries are available for both Mac and Linux:

http://ccb.jhu.edu/software/tophat/downloads/

[from the mountains]

I'm not very good at terminal stuff yet, but I just realized I had downloaded the binaries even though configure was only in the source. in any case, i wasn't able to get boost installed on my mac, so i've got it installed on linux instead (will post below).