Building SVN versions with CMake

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Why would I Need or Want to 'Build' Scribus?

1. For Necessity: You are using the current stable version, but certain bugs are a problem, and you know they have been fixed since the last release.
2. For Science: You have heard about some new features in the development version, and you'd like to try them out.
3. For the World: You're considering helping out the Scribus project and want to see how it's put together to get some idea about how you can help.

'Or, for that matter, what is this 'Building' you speak of?

Expand this content if you need a little bit more background on what Building source code means. --->

When you are going to build or compile Scribus, what you have downloaded (if you have downloaded the source code) is a large collection of plain-text files (ending in '.c' or '.cpp' to denote either the C or C++ programming language respectively). The reason there are so many is that this actually makes the process of developing software easier, and allows for use of small parts repeatedly by different functions of the overall program. These plain-text files need to be converted to binary files (ending in ',o' for object files) so that your computer can use them, and the program works efficiently.

The first step is to configure your downloaded directory of files. This requires a check of your computer to make sure the compiling programs and all the other required outside resources are present and sufficiently up-to-date. Just as Scribus itself consists of these small program files, it also will use those of outside programs, like CUPS, lcms, and so on, so it needs to have on hand those plain text files to connect to these outside resources. After checking for the necessary resources, a script is being written to tell the compiler how to go about building Scribus. The process will fail if you are missing something, and cmake will give you error messages.

The Scribus Team requires the use of CMake for this configuring process. It is quick, easy to use, and easy for the developers to write for – even CMake needs instructions. You can also pass to CMake several special parameters for your particular Computer setup, for example, where you want Scribus to be installed.

Next, the actual 'build' process is done with a program called make. To start the process you simply enter make in a command line. That's it. You do not need to have root privileges to compile, and it is generally recommended that do not compile as root (one reason for this is that, by creating a number of files under root's name, you then interfere with subsequent updating from SVN). Compiling takes up a good part of your computer's resources, especially your processor(s), so you will find its performance rather sluggish while compiling is going on. Consequently, many find that compiling is best done by starting make and then walking away from the PC to let it do its work.

Finally, you need to install, done with the command make install. If you are going to install in the default location, you will need to have root privileges. On most Linux distros this can easily be done with the su command (after which you need root's password), or with sudo, entered as sudo make install. You can run cmake with a command that can install Scribus in a directory for which you have write privileges, and therefore do not need to be root.

For this help, and other advice, continue reading the following sections.

Fear is the mind Killer...

"Do not fear building Scribus from source" ~Paul Muad'dib Atreides

There is nothing to fear here, building Scribus yourself is not as hard as it sounds. This page can teach in many useful ways, starting with geting a peak at comprehending the internals of Scribus to appreciating the Command Line shell and how to invoke commands through it. To follow instructions on how to install software libraries and even at time to modify source code through applying patches. All this will help you increase your skill set to work on most all platforms and widen your knowledge of software creation and maintenance.

Take as an example this following set of commands which are geared towards the Linux environment. Here we see a case in which there is a downloading of the Scribus development version (1.5, not yet stable), building it and then installing it. Note that this assumes that the environment has been prepared previously with all the dependencies installed.

Warning:

You must have CMake version ≥ 2.8.9 for best results. Older versions will fail. See: Official:Compile with CMake

mkdir ~/src/
mkdir ~/src/scribus_svn
sudo mkdir /usr/local/scribus_svn
cd ~/src/scribus_svn
svn co svn://scribus.net/trunk/Scribus
cd ./Scribus
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr/local/scribus_svn ..
make
sudo make install

Note:

• you may change ~/src/ to wherever you want to put your source into.
• you may change /usr/local/scribus_svn/ to wherever you want to put the Scribus binaries.
• in case you want to install the 1.4 stable version, replace the "svn" instruction with following : svn co svn://scribus.net/branches/Version14x/Scribus

1st: Download latest snapshot with Subversion

Subversion is the versioning control system used for Scribus. This allows multiple developers to hack on Scribus source code simultaneously. Check the Subversion page for further details on how to use this tool. Make sure you have svn installed.

All subversion URLs for Scribus anonsvn are based at: svn://scribus.net/
Note: There's also http://scribus.net/svn/Scribus/ , which gets you to the same content, but svn://scribus.net/ is usually faster. Though, HTTP access might be useful to those behind paranoid firewalls or proxies.

If you used to check out -r <Version>, check out <SVN Path> instead:

Version		SVN Path	Status
Version150		/trunk/Scribus	**development version**
Version14x		/branches/Version14x/Scribus	**stable version**
Version133x		/branches/Version133x/Scribus	**old outdated stable version**

Using svn:// to check out 1.4.x.svn, run:
svn co svn://scribus.net/branches/Version14x/Scribus scribus14x

Using svn:// to check out 1.5svn, run:
svn co svn://scribus.net/trunk/Scribus scribus150

Note: Updating your working copy is much the same as cvs - just cd into your working copy and run "svn up".

If you are compiling for the first time, don't be scared of the command line. Just copy the lines relevant to the version of Scribus you want to use, one by one on the command line.

Watch out:

• Newbies should take care, that only 'make install' part has to be done as a root. Rest of the part, like downloading and compiling can be done easily as a normal users.
  You can install as a user, however, if you are installing into a directory you have write permission for. See the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX command below.
• And if you already have a version of Scribus on your system, don't forget to use the option WANT_VERSIONING=1. You can specify this option as -DWANT_VERSIONING=1.

Thanks to Anduin.net, anonymous SVN access is updated daily.

2nd: Download Dependencies

Dependencies are considered to be 3rd party software libraries or other altogether unique software projects that are have components that are needed to build a specific project from. When we want to build Scribus we need to make sure that we have all the dependencies fulfilled or else it will complain to us about missing components or obsolete ones.

Package Managers

Note: many Linux distros have their own Package Managers i.e. Debian has apt, Fedora and Centos have yum, Redhat uses rpm etc... On Mac OS X there are several choices, most popular are Macports and Homebrew. In general, by utilizing the installed package manager we can streamline the installations through easy one liners which will automate the install. We do this by invoking the following pattern:

(package-manager) install (software-or-library-package-name)

Debian;    apt-get install cmake
Fedora:    yum install cmake
MacOSX: brew install cmake

Essential tools

In order for anything to get built, tools need to exist. In modern OS's especially Linux many of these are build tools arrive already bundled. If they aren't for some reason you will need to install them manually using the package manager.

• gcc
• gcc-c++
• cmake
• subversion – if you're going to compile, you might as well get the latest Scribus updates

Specific Dependencies

The following section assumes you need to manually install dependencies. Here are the list of package names that will be needed to be installed before attempting to build Scribus. Each major version of Scribus will require different dependencies.

v1.4.4

Warning:

Please update this section

qt4 
qt4-devel
qtwebkit-devel
poppler-devel              (on debian you might need poppler-private-dev too : see http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11162)
podofo-devel
ghostscript                   (this should already be bundled)
pkgconfig
lcms2-devel
libjpeg-devel
libtiff-devel
cups-devel
libxml2 and libxml2-devel (libxml2 should already be bundled)
python
python-devel
fontconfig-devel
openssl-devel               (?)
freetype
freetype-devel
python-imaging-devel
tk 
tkinter
hunspell 
hunspell-devel              (as of 1.4.2)
cairo                             (cairo should already be bundled)
cairo-devel 
boost-devel

For convenience, here is the above list listed all on the same line ---->

apt-get install qt4 qt4-devel qtwebkit-devel poppler-devel podofo-devel ghostscript pkgconfig lcms2-devel libjpeg-devel libtiff-devel cups-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel python python-devel fontconfig-devel openssl-devel freetype freetype-devel python-imaging-devel tk tkinter hunspell hunspell-devel cairo cairo-devel boost-devel

In addition to the above each Linux distrubution has it's own quirks to be aware of. The subsections below work to address them:

Fedora

Warning:

Please update this section

For Fedora at least, the names are as used with yum, for example:

yum install qt-devel lcms-devel libjpeg-devel libtiff-devel

and so on. On other distros the exact names may vary. Here is a link describing the particulars for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon):

On Fedora, if you install various development packages, you have most of what you need. Exceptions seem to be cups-devel, lcms-devel, tk and tkinter, and python-imaging-devel (maybe cairo-devel). Incidentally, in Fedora 9 and later, Qt4 is loaded by default, and is labeled only qt and qt-devel.

Packages for Ubuntu

Warning:

Please update this section

To install all the required libraries and packages for Debian or Ubuntu type the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-get build-dep scribus-ng

In March 2011 the build dependencies for Scribus 1.4.0 on Debian/Ubuntu were:

debhelper (>= 7), cmake (>= 2.4.3), gcc (>=3.3.5), libqt4-dev (>= 4.6), libcairo2-dev, zlib1g-dev,
liblcms1-dev (>= 1.13), libtiff4-dev, libcups2-dev,libxml2-dev (>= 2.6.16), gettext, python-all-dev,
libboost-python-dev, libaspell-dev, libpodofo-dev (>= 0.8.4), quilt

The easy way for Debian users

Warning:

Please update this section

On Debian, if you install the develeopment packages as described above(apt-get build-dep scribus-ng) you will need the following packages to build the trunk (status September 2011):

• libqtwebkit-dev
• poppler-private-dev may be needed, see 11162

If you're using Debian (or Ubuntu) you need to manually compile the SVN version, only if you want to be really really up to date.

Otherwise, you can rely on the .deb for scribus-ng in our own repositories or, if you don't find the packages for your platform (ppc for instance) you can let apt-get compile from source using the latest sources in the repositories (most of the time those will be older than the SVN ones, but you probably don't really care).

You first have to add the source line for deb-src in synaptic, then you should become root (sudo -i) and:

apt-get source scribus-ng;
cd scribus-ng-1.3.5.dfsg~svn20090208;
apt-get build-dep scribus-ng;
debuild -us -uc; dpkg -i 
../scribus-ng_1.3.5.dfsg~svn20090208-3_i386.deb

For more information on using Scribus with debian, please have a look at the Debian page our offical site

Version 1.5.x

Building Scribus 1.5.0svn and later with Qt5

Starting with rev. 18438 (2 September 2013), building version 1.5.0svn requires Qt5 (for previous revision, it was optional). To build Scribus 1.5.0svn with Qt5, you need all Qt libraries listed above, but this time in their Qt5 incarnation.

If you have Qt4 and Qt5 installed, you need to specify Qt5 with additional CMake options.

As of 21 of September 2013, the best way to get QT5 seems to be to use the installer found on http://qt-project.org/downloads. It suggests as installation directory /home/user/Qt and I suggest you keep to that. The cmake option is -DQT_PREFIX="/home/user/Qt/5.1.1/gcc/". It built OK on SUSE-12.3, Ubuntu-12.04 (Pepperment) and Ubuntu-13.04.

In case you need a list, required qt5 libs are :

 qt5-qtbase.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-devel.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-ibase.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-mysql.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-odbc.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-postgresql.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-static.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-tds.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtbase-x11.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qttools.x86_64 0:5.1.1-3.fc19
 qt5-qttools-devel.x86_64 0:5.1.1-3.fc19
 qt5-qtwebkit.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtwebkit-devel.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtdeclarative.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtdeclarative-devel.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19
 qt5-qtjsbackend.x86_64 0:5.1.1-1.fc19

In case you got problems, Pygmee suggests too : "it build here after i've build sigil where it make a bit changes in QT5 config".

Debian

On Debian Testing, on top of the packages pulled in by apt-get build-dep you need.

• libqt5webkit5-dev
• qtquick1-5-dev
• qtdeclarative5-dev
• qttools5-dev-tools
• qttools5-dev
• liblcms2-dev

They are all available in the official Debian repositories.

This list should also apply for the latest Ubuntu release.

Fedora 20

Fedora 20 has Qt5 packages available from its repositories. The requirements seem to be:

qt5-qtbase
qt5-qtbase-devel
qt5-qtdeclarative
qt5-qtdeclarative-devel
qt5-qttools
qt5-qttools-devel
qt5-qtwebkit
qt5-qtwebkit-devel

There is also a Qt5-compiled version of Sigil in Fedora's repositories. Installing Sigil also installs qt5-qtbase-gui, qt5-qtsvg and qt5-qtxmlpatterns, but I don't think these or their development packages are used to build Scribus 1.5.0. I do note that in the absence of Sigil, the above list will bring in qt5-qtbase-gui as a dependency.

You might need also to install glibc-headers and qt5-qttools-devel packages from the main repo.

Ubuntu 13.04

On Ubuntu 13.04

• use the command line :

sudo apt-get install qt5-default qttools5-dev-tools libqt5location5 libqt5webkit5-dev libqt5webkit5 qt5-qmake libqt5xml5 libqt5gui5 libqt5core5 qttools5-dev qttools5

• then, specifically relating to qt5, install : libqt5declarative5-dev qtlocation5-dev qtsensors5-dev
• install too the usual libs not related to qt5 : zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff5-dev libpython-all-dev libfreetype6-dev libcairo2-dev libcups2-dev libxml++2.6-dev liblcms2-dev

Ubuntu 13.10

Allmost the same : just no qttools5 and no libqt5declarative5-dev but qtdeclarative5-dev instead

sudo apt-get install qt5-default qttools5-dev-tools libqt5location5 libqt5webkit5-dev libqt5webkit5 qt5-qmake libqt5xml5 libqt5gui5 libqt5core5 qttools5-dev
sudo apt-get install qtdeclarative5-dev qtlocation5-dev qtsensors5-dev 
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff5-dev libpython-all-dev libfreetype6-dev libcairo2-dev libcups2-dev libxml++2.6-dev liblcms2-dev

Note 1 : There are bugs with qt5 version 5.0.2. Install qt5 version 5.2 with the installer found on https://qt-project.org/downloads.

Note 2 (JLuc, 25 May 2014) : I followed this procedure step by step and everything when right out of the box.

Note 3 (unknown author) : I had to install TOO :

 libgl1-mesa-dev

and dependencies.

OpenSuse 13.1 RC1 or newer

Install the OS Install these packages via Yast2:

• libQt5WebkitWidgets-devel
• libqt5-qttools-devel
• python-devel
• cairo-devel
• hunspell-devel
• liblcms2-devel (from repo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/libs/openSUSE_13.1/)
• cmake
• subversion

... and that's it.

Proceed with Scribus compilation process.

Additional dependencies for some graphics formats

In 1.5.0+, there are a number of vector and bitmap graphics formats which can now be imported into Scribus. Some of these have particular additional dependencies.

GraphicsMagick (Optional)

You do not need GraphicsMagick to run cmake or compile 1.5.0svn, but some added import filters will be available if you have it (and cmake will detect it automatically). What Scribus needs are the following packages: graphicsmagick, graphicsmagick-devel, graphicsmagick-c++, and graphicsmagick-c++-devel.

OpenSceneGraph (Optional)

This may be available with your Linux distribution (definitely for Fedora 17). You can also download and compile yourself.

For Fedora, typing

sudo yum install OpenSceneGraph OpenSceneGraph-devel

should be enough, and will get you the additional requirements of Inventor, OpenThreads, and OpenThreads-devel.

For OpenSUSE, go to http://software.opensuse.org/package/OpenSceneGraph and use the 1-click install procedure.

MS Publisher and WPG Importers

To build Scribus with support for MS Publisher and WPG files, you need libmspub, as well as libwpg and libwpd. Note that the minimum version for PUB import is libmspub 0.0.6, and also that you want the development packages (libwpd-devel, libwpg-devel, libmspub-devel, for example in Fedora).

To start the build

Before continuing, please note that an out-of-source build is recommended, however.. From the Scribus directory:

/path/to/cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/path/to/install/to/scribuscmake/

For example:

/usr/local/bin/cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/scribus15svn

Some options that the Scribus CMake files know about (more can be found here : http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CMake_Build_Options):

• -DWANT_VERSIONING=1: Sets the build to use the VERSION setting as a suffix for the install directories and the binary. Eg, the binary could be scribus-1.3.5svn. This should mean that you can install multiple versions with the same prefix with no clashes.
• -DWANT_DEBUG=1: Sets the build to be a debug release and use -O0 -g3, instead of -O2 (This is the default for now, and cannot be turned off unless you edit the CMakeFiles.txt file).
• -DWANT_CAIRO=1: Makes CMake search for cairo and build with cairo instead of LibArt_LGPL. cairo is the primary supported option for 1.3.5+.
• -DWANT_LIBART=1 (not available in 1.3.5, default in 1.3.3.x): Makes CMake search for and build with LibArt_LGPL instead of cairo.
• -DWANT_QTARTHUR=1: In 1.3.5, uses the QT4 ARTHUR rendering library. This is an alternative to CAIRO.
• -DWANT_HUNSPELL=1: This will enable the new (as of 1.4.2) hunspell-based spell checking capabilities across *all* platforms.

If you have several version of QT installed or QT is installed in a non standard location you'll have to tell cmake where to find it by setting -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE

For example: to make a cairo debug build, then something like this:

/usr/local/bin/cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/scribus134cvs -DWANT_CAIRO=1 -DWANT_DEBUG=1 -DWANT_VERSIONING=1

To use qt_arthur instead:

/usr/local/bin/cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/scribus134cvs -DWANT_QTARTHUR=1 -DWANT_DEBUG=1 -DWANT_VERSIONING=1

Out-of-source builds

One of the advantages of CMake is that you can do an out-of-source build. What is this? It enables you to build the application without writing anything at all to the directory where the Scribus source is. This means your source tree is clean, always. Its easier and faster to update, and you can build multiple targets out-of-source from the same source tree. Cool!

To do an out-of-source build, you need a new directory to build in. Say you have the source files in:

/home/username/scribuscmake/Scribus

Make the following directory:

/home/username/scribuscmake/builddir

So then, instead of doing:

eg /usr/local/bin/cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/scribus15svn

you would then change to the builddir directory and run:

eg /usr/local/bin/cmake ../Scribus -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/opt/scribus15svn

Simple!

More CMake Options

CMake_Build_Options

Continuing on to the build stage

Once this has successfully completed, simply run make && make install.

The CMake based build system is very new to Scribus and it will change and it will need improving. Please report issues on our mailing list or bugtracker.

There is a long todo list for this build system including, but not limited to:

• Checking it works across distributions
• Checking it works across various flavours of UNIX
• Checking it works on 64 bit distros
• Add Win32 and Mac OSX support

Making a tarball for distribution

To make a tarball for distribution, the old way would be to make dist. The new way is to run make package_source or /path/to/cpack -G TBZ2 --config CPackSourceConfig.cmake to give you a bundle of the source. With cmake 2.4.1 there is only support for a gzip tar.gz however a bzip2 tar.bz2 is possible with later versions of cmake.

Notes For Packagers

If you package Scribus for a distribution keep in mind the issue of the install prefix versus temporary install directory prefix. The following seems to work well for Debian packaging:

>_______mkdir -p $(BUILD_DIR)

>_______cd $(BUILD_DIR) && $(CMAKE) \
>_______    -DWANT_DEBUG:STRING=$(DEBUG_FLAG) \
>_______    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr \
>_______    -DCMAKE_SKIP_RPATH:BOOL=1 \
>_______    -DRPATH_STYLE:STRING=none \
>_______    -DWANT_VERSIONING:BOOL=1 \
>_______    -DCUSTOM_VERSIONTAG:STRING=-ng \
>_______    -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS:STRING='-o2 -g -Wall' \
>_______    -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS:STRING='-o2 -g -Wall' ../../

then

>_______$(MAKE) -C $(BUILD_DIR) install DESTDIR=$(INSTALL_DIR)

where $(BUILD_DIR) is ./build and $(INSTALL_DIR) is ./install

Using $(PREFIX) is the key to avoiding hardcoded absolute path problem.

TODO

• Enable more pkg-config usage
• Prefixes for more packages
• Create a new Homebrew formula for MacOSX and eventually add to this page