Contributions from people working at Lehrstuhl D, RWTH Aachen, or any other place can become available in GAP in two different ways:
1. They can become parts of the main GAP library of functions. Their origin will then be rather carefully documented in the respective program files, but will not occur in the description of these functions in the manual. This is e.g. the case -- to mention just one of many such contributions -- with programs for finding composition factors of permutation groups, written by Akos Seress. The reason for this decision about keeping track of the origin of such contributions is that quite often such functions in the main GAP library have a complicated history with changes and contributions from various people.
2. On the other hand there are packages written by one or several persons for specific purposes either in the GAP language or even in C which are made available en block in GAP. Such packages will constitute share libraries. A share library will stay under the full responsibility of its author(s), which will be named in the respective chapter in the manual, they will in particular keep the copyright for this package, and they will also have to provide the documentation for it. However provisions will be made to call the functions of such a package like any other GAP functions, and to call the documentation via help functions like any other part of the GAP documentation. Also these packages will automatically be made available with the main body of GAP through ftp and will be sent together with the main body of GAP in case we have to fulfill a request to send GAP to institutions that cannot obtain GAP via electronic networks.
The inclusion of packages as GAP share libraries should be negotiated with Lehrstuhl D fuer Mathematik, RWTH Aachen, for certain standards of the documentation and program organisation that should be met in order to facilitate the use of the packages in the context of GAP without problems. A necessary condition for any package to become a GAP share library is that it is made available under the conditions formulated in the GAP copyright statement, in particular free of any charge, except for refund of expenses for sending, if such occur.
The first section describes how to load a share library package (see RequirePackage).
The next sections describe the ANU pq package and how to install it (see ANU pq Package and Installing the ANU pq Package).
The next sections describe the ANU Sq package and how to install it (see ANU Sq Package and Installing the ANU Sq Package).
The next sections describe the GRAPE package and how to install it (see GRAPE Package and Installing the GRAPE Package).
The next sections describe the MeatAxe package and how to install it (see MeatAxe Package and Installing the MeatAxe Package).
NQ Package and Installing the NQ Package).
The next sections describe the SISYPHOS package and how to install it (see SISYPHOS Package and Installing the SISYPHOS Package).
The next sections describe the VE package and how to install it (see Installing the Vector Enumeration Package).
The last sections describe the experimental X-Windows interface (see The XGap Package ).
GAP 3.4.4