Compile Guncash

Tommy Trussell tommy.trussell at gmail.com
Sat Mar 28 16:14:24 EDT 2015


On Sat, Mar 28, 2015 at 1:19 PM, AC <gnucash at acarver.net> wrote:

> On 2015-03-28 00:14, Geert Janssens wrote:
> > On Friday 27 March 2015 15:28:27 AC wrote:
> >> On 2015-03-27 15:06, Colin Law wrote:
> >>> On 27 March 2015 at 18:18, AC <gnucash at acarver.net> wrote:
> >>>> On 2015-03-27 09:25, Dennis Powless wrote:
> >>>>> I had read the readme file and was not very helpful.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I had entered the command.   ./configure but got errors.  I want
> >>>>> to say it was the target, but later when I had stated the target
> >>>>> it worked.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Why does the above mentioned wiki have me make a .deb file, when
> >>>>> others don't.  This didn't work.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Checkinstall vs make install
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Thanks for the info,  very helpful
> >>>>
> >>>> I don't understand why the tarball insists on making a .deb (or if
> >>>> the wiki is confused and suggests it makes one when the tarball
> >>>> really doesn't).  Most of the time when compiling from a tarball
> >>>> the binaries are made directly (no deb's) and installed directly.
> >>>> If the tarball really is making a deb then I suspect it's to
> >>>> ensure that gnucash shows up in the package manager.
> >>>
> >>> The tarball does not insist on making a deb, it is just that the
> >>> person that wrote that section of the wiki wanted to do it that way.
> >>> When I did the entries for earlier versions of Ubuntu (which can be
> >>> seen in the wiki) I just compiled to binaries and ran or installed
> >>> from those.  If I needed to compile gnucash now I would do it the
> >>> way
> >>> I described rather than making a deb, which I think just adds
> >>> complexity.  Also I think it is better to get the source from git
> >>> rather than using the tarball.
> >>
> >> Ok, perhaps that section should end up being split into a standard
> >> compile with direct binaries and then the optional deb later.  It
> >> seems to cause enough confusion especially when the instructions are
> >> different from the portions you wrote.
> >>
> > Good suggestion. Feel free to go in and improve this. As this is a wiki
> > everybody is encouraged to work on it.
> >
>
> I'll take a look but I don't use Ubuntu so I can't really edit that
> particular section.  It just has too many idiosyncrasies.  Best I could
> do would be to add a generic section.
>

I don't believe Ubuntu necessarily has more idiosyncrasies than any other
distro; folks have merely used the Ubuntu section to try out lots of
different things, and presented them as if they are Ubuntu version
dependent. In practice, the only things that SHOULD vary with Ubuntu
releases are the versions of particular supporting libraries and maybe a
few tweaks based on those.

I have been puzzling over this for awhile -- there are lots of options that
really ought to be described better in the wiki:

1) DEB: whether or not to create a .deb package (applies to Debian or
Ubuntu) -- the advantage to a .deb is you can compile the package to
install in any standard or non-standard location and remove it easily using
the package manager. (Surely there might be a similar procedure for
building your own .rpm but I don't use Fedora etc. daily and haven't
looked.)

2) SOURCE: how you downloaded the source (git, tarball, or Debian / Ubuntu
source packages) -- as Geert happened to bring up recently in the -devel
list, the compilation procedure differs depending upon where the source
came from. (I personally tried to wrangle the section about
"self-backporting" using the Debian or Ubuntu source packages but I wasn't
able to make that work reliably in recent versions. This is certainly due
to my ignorance, though, because the source packages obviously compile
correctly for Debian and Ubuntu and GetDeb builders.)

3) INSTALLATION LOCATION: where GnuCash executables get installed (the
standard Debian / Ubuntu location, or a local single-user-only location, or
a traditional linux site-local installation, or ... )

4) COMPILE OPTIONS: what compile-time options are absolutely necessary or
just recommended, and a brief description of what they do.

5) other common choices not reflected above?

6) VERSION-SPECIFIC: the sections that vary based on your version of Ubuntu
or Debian (or whatever) should be separate choices. HOWEVER folks want to
be able to jump right in and compile away without thinking about options
1-5.


What's the best way to present all these things? Is there any way to show
them in the wiki that would be maintainable? Most of these choices are not
even specific to Ubuntu.



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