Building 2.8 on Ubuntu 16.04 - Wiki Proposal

[Geert Janssens]

On donderdag 7 september 2017 10:58:30 CEST Carsten Rinke wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> starting with an Ubuntu 16.04 installation from scratch, this is what I
> did to make GnuCash 2.8 build with autotools:
> 
Nice!

> autogen.sh:
> ===========
> sudo apt-get install intltool
> sudo apt-get install autoconf automake autotools-dev libsigsegv2 m4
> sudo apt-get install libtool libltdl-dev
> sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
> 
> configure
> =========
> sudo apt-get install icu-devtools libicu-dev
> sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev
> sudo apt-get install guile-2.0 guile-2.0-dev
> sudo apt-get install swig2.0
> sudo apt-get install libxml++2.6-dev
> sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev
> sudo apt-get install xsltproc
> sudo apt-get install libgtest-dev
> sudo apt-get install google-mock
> sudo apt-get install gtk+3.0
> sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev
> sudo apt-get install webkit2gtk-3.0 # >600MB !
> 
A few questions/remarks:

* Which packet pulls in the dev package for webkit2gtk ?

* I don't know whether this is also on Ubuntu, though on Fedora if you install 
libgtk-3.dev, that will automatically pull in gtk+3.0 (using the Ubuntu 
package names here)

* I'd condense this to one or two apt-get commands rather than the long list 
of separate commands.

* Does listing this under separate build steps (autogen.sh vs configure) add 
anything useful or could you just call it install system prerequisites or 
something like that ?

> make (xml backend)
> =============
> mkdir build-master
> cd build-master
> ../gnucash/autogen.sh
I didn't know you could call autogen.sh out of tree. If you can, so much the 
better. It will however still create files in the source directory. So it may 
be better to call this directly in the source directory to make this more 
clear. I'm not sure about which way is best.

> ../gnucash/configure --prefix=<path>/gnucash-master
> --enable-compile-warnings --disable-error-on-warning --disable-dbi
> make
> sudo make install
> 
> If this looks ok to you I would put it onto the Wikipage 1:1 as a
> starting point.
It's certainly a good starting point. I would definitely also illustrate how 
to build with dbi enabled (many people want this) and which additional 
dependencies this has.

And considering you wrote this for 2.8 I would consider using cmake instead of 
autotools. It's very likely we will drop the latter as soon as we're sure our 
cmake configuration does everything autotools does until now. The biggest 
roadblock to this has recently been solved (running cmake on Ubuntu 14.04LTS) 
so I was about to propose again to drop autotools.

Geert