The QPA package for GAP 4.12
==================================

Version 1.36; April 7th, 2025
Copyright (C) 2025 The QPA-team, 	
             https://folk.ntnu.no/oyvinso/QPA/

Introduction
------------

The "Quivers and Path Algebras" team has as a goal to develop a GAP
package(s) for carrying out computations for finite dimensional
quotients of path algebras over the fields that are available in
GAP. The package we aim to develop for GAP is called QPA for Quivers
and Path Algebras.

QPA is designed as a GAP >= 4.5.x share package providing new functions in
noncommutative algebra. For the current functions provided by QPA read the
manual for QPA:

              https://folk.ntnu.no/oyvinso/QPA/manual.pdf

Contents
--------

The following should be included with this version of QPA.


    CHANGES  	  - files containing the history of changes in 
               	    QPA since version 1.05.
    LICENSE  	  - the license governing QPA usage
    PackageInfo.g - contains metainformation about the package
    README        - this file
    doc      	  - the user manuals
    examples 	  - manual examples in separate files, chapterwise 
    init.g   	  - package initialization
    lib        	  - the GAP source code
    read.g   	  - package initialization
    tst      	  - tests for the package
    version       - contains the version number of the latest version

Installation
------------

Since the release of GAP version 4.7.8, the package QPA is distributed
with GAP, so if you download this version or any later version QPA
will be installed at the same time as GAP is installed.  Follow the
instructions for installing GAP on the web page

  https://www.gap-system.org/Download/index.html

After having successfully started GAP, give the command

gap> LoadPackage("qpa");

which loads QPA and you can start using QPA.

For GAP version 4.7.7 or older, or you want a newer version of QPA than
the one that is distributed with GAP, follow the following instructions:

1.  Locate a pkg-directory where GAP searches for packages, see
    9.2 GAP Root Directories in the GAP manual for more information.
2a. Download a release of QPA from
          https://github.com/gap-packages/qpa/releases
    and unpack it in the pkg-directory you located in 1.
2b. Alternatively, clone the git-repository of QPA by giving the following
    command:
        git clone https://github.com/gap-packages/qpa.git qpa
    when you are in the pkg-directory you located in 1.
    For making the documentation for QPA give the command  
      	   MakeQPADocumentation();
    inside a gap-session with QPA loaded.
    For later obtaining the latest version of QPA, give the command
      	 git pull
    when you are inside the qpa-directory. 


Using QPA
----------

To load the QPA-package, give the command

     LoadPackage("qpa");

To avoid having to load QPA each time you use GAP, you can add "qpa"
to the user preference PackagesToLoad, as explained in

https://www.mail-archive.com/forum@mail.gap-system.org/msg02528.html

See the user manual in the doc directory for more information
regarding the use of QPA, or follow the URL

     https://folk.ntnu.no/oyvinso/QPA/manual.pdf

to see the current manual/documentation of QPA (still work in
progress, not brilliant at this point).

A tool for working with quivers in QPA is QPA-draw by Luke Kershaw (https://github.com/l-kershaw).  
You find this at 

     https://l-kershaw.github.io/qpa-draw/   

Currently the functionality includes converting back and forth between

    a drawing of a quiver, and
    a machine readable form for use with QPA.

Contact
-------

If you have a question or encounter any problems regarding QPA, you
can either:

 * contact one of the QPA-team members, see the webpage
              https://folk.ntnu.no/oyvinso/QPA
or
 * report an issue at https://github.com/gap-packages/qpa/issues/new