Hi,
What's the best way to determine the version of polymake that is installed automatically?
Context: I'm writing a Macaulay2 package that will use some polymake functionality if the user has polymake installed, and do things differently if not. For this we need to know whether the user has polymake version >3.0 installed, and the method should not depend on how they have it installed.
One of my coauthors, working under linux, has suggested string searching on "polymake --version". However, at least on my Mac, that just launches a new terminal starting polymake (and doesn't return a string). Is there another method?
We'd prefer to not need to know whether the user has polymake installed, if they have it.
Thanks,
Diane