1. Prerequisites
1.1. Compilers
To compile the standalone DomTool tools, you will need the [http://mlton.org/ MLton] [http://www.standardml.org/ Standard ML] compiler. It's available as Debian package "mlton". The version in Debian testing works fine, but the stable version is too old, so grab the Debian stable version of the latest release from [http://mlton.org/Download the MLton download page].
To use DomTool from an interactive SML REPL session, you will need a recent version of [http://www.smlnj.org/ Standard ML of New Jersey]. The SML/NJ packages in non-experimental Debian are so old that I don't bother using them, opting to install SML/NJ manually following the directions on the SML/NJ web site. Chances are you can get by just fine without support for interactive REPL use and can skip installing SML/NJ if you don't want it for some other purpose.
Why am I referencing two different compilers here? Well, developing with SML/NJ and building release binaries with MLton is standard practice in the SML world. SML/NJ supports separate compilation and interactive use, which are very helpful during development. MLton is a whole-program optimizing compiler that produces extremely efficient binaries, at the cost of much greater compile-time time and memory usage than SML/NJ.
1.2. Libraries
You will need the OpenSSL C library with development files, available in Debian package "libssl-dev".
1.3. Utilities
If you plan to run a server (dispatcher or slave), you'll need rsync, which is available in Debian package "rsync".
2. Getting the source code
You can obtain the approximately-latest version of the DomTool source code from [http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=99567 SourceForge anonymous CVS]. The module name is portal. I write "approximately" because it can take about a day for the latest changes to propagate from developer CVS to anonymous CVS. I'll duplicate the directions from that SourceForge help page and tell you that you can check out this module by running: {{{cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@hcoop.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/hcoop login cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@hcoop.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/hcoop co -P portal}}}
Just press enter when prompted for a password.
If you have been granted write permission to the repository and plan to commit code changes, then you'll want to check the repo out from developer CVS, like so: {{{export CVS_RSH=ssh cvs -z3 -d:ext:developername@hcoop.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/hcoop co -P portal}}}
3. Building the standalone tools
First, change to the portal directory that you have checked out and run
# something for adamc to fill out
3.1. Reinstalling the standalone tools
If you want to reinstall the portal on machines that are running it already, then it is best to use a slightly modified set of instructions.
4. Building for SML/NJ
After following the same procedure as above for config.sml, run
make smlnj
followed by
make install
as root. Now you should be able to run sml in the base domtool2 directory and run CM.make "src/domtool.cm";. If you don't see any error messages, then the DomTool modules are loaded and you can start poking them. For instance, running open Main; should print information on the primary entry-points.