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Version 6 (modified by mmcco, 9 years ago) (diff)

initial build notes

Michael McConville (mmcc, mmcco)

I'm a rising senior at Swarthmore College working as Pidgin's resident "Maintenance Hero" through the 2015 Google Summer of Code. My main goal is to help get our 3.0.0 release out the door. I also plan to work on voice and video and end-to-end encryption.

Contact

  • Jabber: mmcc@jabber.at (OTR preferred)
  • Email: mmcco ~a~ mykolab.com

What I'm working on

Notes on building Pidgin 3.0

Pidgin 3.0 has many dependencies, including some new ones and some that are a little tricky to get set up properly. Don't take this as gospel - it's simply what I've done to make the builds work reliably.

I've been doing my dev work on Ubuntu 15.04 (the most recent release at the moment). I install all manually compiled packages into the prefix $HOME/env/ to keep /usr/ clean and Ubuntu-specific. I strongly recommend this - it makes it easier to specify which version of a library should be used, and it prevents linker-related headaches and system reinstalls when you start getting library-related errors. I've added $HOME/env/ to the following environment variables to make it fully usable:

  • PATH
  • LIBDIR
  • LIBRARY_PATH
  • LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  • C_INCLUDE_PATH
  • CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH
  • PKG_CONFIG_PATH

GPlugin

GPlugin was added as a Pidgin dependency in May 2015. It's meant to allow plugins to be written in any programming language through the use of GObject introspection. There were build problems in 0.18 involving Mozilla's gjs library (apparently only C++ headers were available while C headers were needed), but that's been removed as a dependency for now.

GPlugin is new, and isn't yet included in Debian or Ubuntu's package repos. You therefore have to build from source. Additionally, I wasn't able to find which (if any) environment variable determines the search path for .gir files. I therefore grudgingly installed it without my build environment prefix. I've since been told that such an environment variable does exist, though - I'll share it here once I find it.

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