Compiling and Installing

January 3, 2024 ยท View on GitHub

Dependencies

On Ubuntu based system install dependencies with:

sudo apt-get install git dh-autoreconf autotools-dev debhelper \
  libconfuse-dev libgtk-3-dev libpcre2-dev libvte-2.91-dev pkg-config

You possibly need other packages such as gettext, automake, autoconf, autopoint, and X11 development libraries.

On Fedora:

# This may be outdated (see Ubuntu example above, for a more thorough list)
sudo yum install git automake libconfuse-devel vte3-devel gtk3-devel \
  glib-devel gettext-devel

The dependencies section above is complete but the sample command may not be complete, depending on your system you may need to install additional packages. Please carefully read the output of the autogen.sh (see below) for more information of what you need to install.

Compiling

Generally if you have installed the development packages (e.g. *-dev or *-devel) of the dependencies above and the autotools suite then it should be possible to compile with:

mkdir build
cd build
../autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make --silent

Changing to build/ and calling autogen.sh relative from there makes sure that we perform an out-of-tree build and all generated files are stored inside build/. This way build artifacts will not clutter the source directory. For debugging, we can use the --enable-maintainer-flags option, which enables additional debug flags and runtime debug messages as well as more compile-time warnings:

../autogen.sh --enable-maintainer-flags

Alternatively, you can enable these separately by adding --debug-functions or --enable-debug to the autogen call:

../autogen.sh --enable-debug-functions --enable-debug

If you get the following error message, then you are missing the autopoint binary which is part of the autotools suite. On Ubuntu the dh-autoreconf package installs it along with automake, autoconf and autoreconf.

Can't exec "autopoint": No such file or directory at [\]
  /usr/share/autoconf/Autom4te/FileUtils.pm line 345.

You do not need the --silent option, but I prefer to use it to reduce the output a bit. If you experience any problem during build, then drop the --silent option.

Installing

After you have compiled the package run the following command to install tilda to the prefix that you have chosen before:

sudo make install

If you don't want to install to the /usr prefix, choose some other prefix when you run the autogen.sh script, such as /opt/tilda and add it to your path.

Packaging for Debian

This section explains how to package Tilda for Debian and Debian derived distributions.

Preparation before building the package

In order to build a package which can be uploaded to some Debian based distribution the following steps are necessary. Replace '#' with the number of the current minor and patch release version.

  1. Check out the latest stable branch (e.g. tilda-1-#) and add any changes or bugfixes which you want to include, then commit these changes. Tilda stable branches are named tilda-<MAJOR>-<MINOR> and all patch level releases for the same minor release go into that branch.

  2. Change into the po/ folder, run make update-po and commit any changed .po files in the po folder. If this change is forgotten, then after running make distcheck below there may be uncommitted changed to the po folder in the source tree.

  3. Update the Changelog and commit it:

    git commit -m "Update the change log for 1.#.#"

  4. Update the version number in configure.ac and make a commit, the version number as commit message:

    git commit -m "1.#.#"

  5. Create a tarball from the build folder:

    cd build/
make distcheck

    This will give you a tarball in the build folder named tilda-1.#.#, the tarball needs to be copied to the location where you are building the package and it needs to be renamed (or symlinked) as tilda_1.#.#.orig.tar.gz.

  6. Checkout the packaging files for tilda and update the change log at debian/changelog such that it contains an entry for the latest version of tilda. Note, the debian/changelog should not contain information about tilda specific changes but about changes related to the Debian packaging.

Building a package

With the above make distcheck command you get a tarball from which a Debian package can be build. A Debian package consists of a separate source and binary package. The following steps document the basic commands that are required to build both the source package and the binary package, to verify that both are correct and to upload the source package to mentors.debian.org.

I am using pbuilder to build the source and binary packages. Please refer to the man pages pbuilder(8) on howto setup the base image. I also use pdebuild as a convenient script to run debuild inside the pbuilder environment (see pdebuild(1)).

The following process creates several files and packages in the folder from where these commands are executed, its useful to perform these commands in a separate folder such as tilda-releases:

  1. mkdir tilda-releases; cd tilda-releases.

  2. Copy the release tarball to the current location and extract it: tar -xf tilda_1.2.#.orig.tar.gz

  3. cd tilda-1.#.#

  4. Checkout the tilda-debian repository from Github and copy the debian/ folder to tilda-1.#.#/.

  5. To build the source package you need to run debuild. You can use one of the following two methods to do this:

    • Run debuild inside a change root by using pdebuild:

      sudo pdebuild --use-pdebuild-internal \
  -- --basetgz ~/pbuilder/unstable-base.tgz

    • Run debuild directly from the current folder (e.g. from tilda-1.#.#/)

  6. If debuild finishes without a problem next run pbuilder, this will verify that the package is buildable (without warnings or errors) in a clean environment:

    sudo pbuilder --build --basetgz ~/pbuilder/unstable-base.tgz \
  tilda_1.#.#-1.dsc

  7. Optionally run lintian:

    lintian -I --show-overrides tilda_1.#.#-1_amd64.changes

  8. Run debsign to sign the package with your PGP key:

    debsign tilda_1.#.#-1_amd64.changes

  9. If pbuilder does not complain and you don not see any warnings in lintian, then upload the package to mentors:

    dput mentors tilda_1.#.#-1_amd64.changes

Notes on pbuilder

The commands above assume an up to date pbuilder image for debian unstable which can be created via:

mkdir ~/pbuilder; cd ~/pbuilder
sudo pbuilder create --basetgz unstable-base-test.tgz --distribution sid \
  --mirror http://deb.debian.org/debian

The --mirror option is necessary when creating the image on downstream distributions such as Ubuntu. In such a case pbuilder would use the Ubuntu mirror and will complain that the repository has no unstable release.