Compiling Evolution from SVN
From Evolution
SVN is no more used and has been replaced by Git. This guide is outdated.
This document in not ready yet
Below you will find my experience about builing evolution on Ubuntu 7.04. This guide is based on Compiling Evolution from CVS
[gibrovacco] after reading:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2008-December/msg00092.html
I added some comments about how to get this nice guide working with ubuntu 8.10 intrepid ibex and MAPI.
Why?
I noted that a lot easy-to-fix bugs exist, which involve altering the source of Evolution. In order to do that, you will need to get that beast compiled from source of course. I assume a lot people have been scared away cause of that first task. However, if you know what and how, building it ain't really hard at all. So thats why I've setup this little guide.
So this document is for development purposes. Normal users (who aren't planning to start developing Evolution) shouldn't be reading this. Really. I'm serious about this! You will probably not understand a single thing about this documentation if you don't have a strong Linux-development background!
First!
Go to this URL, and read all of it. (Yes all of it.) This is the Evolution: Developer Information page. You can skip "Building Evolution". It explains how to build Evolution using jhbuild. The jhbuild tool is nice but a.t.m. I find the current version of that documentation rather clumsy. Once you have read the linked page entirely, return here and continue.
The Developer Information page provides good background information, but the instructions on the current page should be sufficient to get you going with a bleeding-edge build of the products. If you want to follow the instructions provided, consider reading the Developer Information page for reference only.
Okay
okay, lets go
Platforms we have tried (feel free to add comments about the same procedures for your platform to this document)
Ubuntu 7.04 Ubuntu 8.10
Prerequisites
(Optional) sudo make install magic
For the 'sudo make install'-magic, put the following in your /etc/sudoers file. But don't do this on a system with multiple users or where security is of any importance.
username ALL = NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/make
Note: It should not be necessary to run something as root, as long as you configure all things with "--disable-scrollkeeper --disable-gtk-doc"
(Optional) distcc
Recommended if you have multiple hosts. Install ccache and distcc. If you do, add -j# as a parameter to each make-command. A good value for # is the amount of CPU's that will do the job multiplied by two.
export CC="ccache distcc" export DISTCC_HOSTS="host1withdistcc host2withdistcc localhost"
If you copy-paste from this wiki-page, you can use the $CPUS variable for this
export CPUS="-j6"
Important note: You'll need to rebuild the modules from scratch (redo the configure/autogen.sh steps) you want to switch from using distcc (with optionally ccache) to using a normal C-compiler like gcc. Also note that you need the same version of compiler on each host, or follow the steps about using different compilers (checkout the webpages of distcc for more about this). You can't mix (link them) for example gcc 3.3 object files with gcc 3.2 ones or gcc 3.3 ones with gcc 4.0 ones. It will fail.
On Ubuntu
Simply run the following command(s):
sudo apt-get install gtk-doc-tools subversion gnome-core-devel libgail-gnome-dev \ libldap2-dev evolution libnss-dev libnspr-dev flex bison build-essential
If you are on Ubuntu gutsy, you might want to install
libxt-dev texinfo libgdbm-dev texi2html libnss3-dev libnspr4-dev
On Ubuntu intrepid execute the following (maybe some packages aren't needed. Please remove them if you find any)
sudo apt-get install gtk-doc-tools subversion gnome-core-devel libgail-gnome-dev libldap2-dev \ evolution flex bison build-essential python-dev libtalloc-dev flex autoconf \ tdb-dev bison libxt-dev texinfo libgdbm-dev texi2html libnss3-dev libnspr4-dev \ gnome-common gtk-doc-tools libxml2-dev libgconf2-dev libsqlite3-dev libgail-gnome-dev \ libgnomeui-dev libenchant-dev
Building
Before the actual build takes place
Prepare a build-directory
mkdir -p ~/svn/gnome cd ~/svn/gnome
You should take a look at this page and get all development modules http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/svn.shtml
The general command is:
svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/MODULE_NAME/trunk MODULE_NAME
If you have a svn account on gnome (If you hack on Evolution, they will give you one sooner or later) use this
svn checkout svn+ssh:///svn/MODULE_NAME/trunk MODULE_NAME
Getting the sources
svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution/trunk evolution svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-data-server/trunk evolution-data-server svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gtkhtml/trunk gtkhtml svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/libsoup/trunk libsoup svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-exchange/trunk evolution-exchange (optional) svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-webcal/trunk evolution-webcal (optional)
On intrepid, if you want compatibility with the MAPI protocol (used i.e. in Exchange server 2007), you'll need a fresh version of ical, samba4, openchange and evolution-mapi. At this very moment the versions of the three first .deb packages arent't compatible with the evolution-mapi plugin.
wget http://garr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/freeassociation/libical-0.43.tar.gz tar xvfz libical-0.43.tar.gz svn co https://websvn.openchange.org/openchange/trunk openchange svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-mapi/trunk evolution-mapi wget http://www.samba.org/samba/ftp/samba4/samba-4.0.0alpha6.tar.gz tar xvfz samba-4.0.0alpha6.tar.gz
Doing libsoup
pushd libsoup PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make $CPUS make install popd
Doing gtkhtml
pushd gtkhtml PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make $CPUS make install popd
Optionally: Doing libical (only for intrepid-MAPI)
pushd libical-0.43 PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make $CPUS make install popd export CFLAGS="-I/opt/gnome2/include" export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/gnome2/lib"
Note: during the process you could receive errors such as
../../libtool: line 764: X--tag=CC: command not found
This is most probably due to a difference between the version of libtoolize on your pc and the one used when packaging ical. To solve this simply execute:
rm libtool ltmain.sh libtoolize -f
and restart from "Doing libical".
Doing evolution-data-server
pushd evolution-data-server PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --with-openldap=yes --enable-gnome-keyring=yes --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make $CPUS make install popd
Note: On my Feisty install I had to give the path to nspr and install flex for this build to work. Here were my steps:
pushd evolution-data-server PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --with-openldap=yes --enable-gnome-keyring=yes --prefix=/opt/gnome2 --with-nspr-includes=/usr/include/firefox/nspr make $CPUS make install popd
Doing evolution
pushd evolution PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 \ --with-openldap=yes \ --enable-nntp=yes --enable-ipv6=yes --enable-test-component=yes \ --enable-nss=yes --enable-smime=yes --enable-plugins=all make $CPUS make install popd
Note: On my Feisty install I had to add the path to the nspr and nss includes as well as include the new evolution related libs in ldconfig, here were my steps:
vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/evolution.conf /opt/gnome2/lib /opt/gnome2/lib/evolution/2.12 ldconfig pushd evolution PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 \ --with-openldap=yes \ --enable-nntp=yes --enable-ipv6=yes --enable-test-component=yes \ --enable-nss=yes --enable-smime=yes --enable-plugins=all \ --with-nspr-includes=/usr/include/firefox/nspr --with-nss-includes=/usr/include/firefox/nss make $CPUS make install popd
[mbarnes] You can also use an environment variable to tell the linker where to look for libraries:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib:/opt/gnome2/lib/evolution/2.12
After make install completed, you're done with the builds, but you still have to configure the bonobo activation server as described below before you can run Evolution.
Optionally: Doing evolution-exchange
pushd evolution-exchange PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make $CPUS make install popd
Optionally: Doing evolution-webcal
pushd evolution-webcal PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make $CPUS sudo make install popd
Optionally: Doing evolution-mapi
samba4
pushd samba-4.0.0alpha6/source4 PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make make install
openchange
pushd openchange PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnome2 --with-samba=/opt/gnome2 make $CPUS sudo make install popd
evolution-mapi
pushd evolution-mapi/ PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2 make make install popd
Update bonobo-activation-config.xml
Search for the file bonobo-activation-config.xml. Usually it's installed at /etc/bonobo-activation/bonobo-activation-config.xml. You'll need to add the location where your evolution-data-server binary is installed.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<oafconfig>
<searchpath>
< ! - - Don't remove existing items - - >
<item>/opt/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers/</item>
</searchpath>
</oafconfig>
[mbarnes] Or you can just set an environment variable:
export BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers
After this, kill the process "bonobo-activation-server".
killall bonobo-activation-server
This process will be restarted next time Evolution is run.
Create a small wrapper-script
Copy it to, for example, /usr/local/bin/evolution-cvs or in /opt/evo/bin and put that path in your PATH environment variable.
You'll need GNU versions of tools like ps, pidof, bash or a sh that will do these scripts correctly, gdb, ddd, grep and cut. To use these scripts, it's important that you've succesfully build evolution from source. Also note that I did hardcoded some source-code filelocations in the scripts. For example $HOME/cvs/gnome/evolution/evolution-plugin.pc. If your checkout from cvs is differently located, you'll need to adjust these paths in all scripts you'll find here.
#! /bin/sh
prefix=`grep "^prefix=" $HOME/cvs/gnome/evolution/evolution-plugin.pc | cut -d "=" -f 2`
version=`grep "BASE_VERSION=" $HOME/cvs/gnome/evolution/configure.in | cut -d "=" -f 2`
function strstr () {
[ ${#2} -eq 0 ] && { echo "$1" ; return 0; }
case "$1" in
*$2*) ;;
*) return 1;;
esac
first=${1/$2*/}
echo "${1##$first}"
}
substr=`strstr "$prefix/lib/bonobo/servers" $BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH`
if test x"$substr" != x"$prefix/lib/bonobo/servers"
then
killall -9 bonobo-activation-server
# in case the file bonobo-activation-config.xml is incorrect
export BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH=$prefix/lib/bonobo/servers:$BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH
fi
substr=`strstr "$prefix/lib" $LD_LIBRARY_PATH`
if test x"$substr" != x"$prefix/lib"
then
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$prefix/lib:/usr/lib/evolution/$version/:/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
fi
substr=`strstr "$prefix/bin/:$prefix/libexec/" $PATH`
if test x"$substr" != x"$prefixbin/:$prefix/libexec/"
then
export PATH=$prefix/bin/:$prefix/libexec/:$PATH
fi
$prefix/bin/evolution-$version $1 $2 $3 $4 $5
ps. You can download it here.
Upgrading
When upgrading your build I'm assuming you want to get the very latest version thats available in SVN. Beware that it will be very unlikely that it compiles and if it does it will be unstable. But then again, real developers like it unstable for then they can fix those bugs. Right? No?
The rule of thumb is that if new files are added and/or if configure.in or configure.ac is modified, you'll probably need to make distclean the module and start building it from scratch. But it highly depends. An experienced GNOME programmer knows when there's a need to recompile a module from scratch.
cd ~/svn/gnome/
Upgrading libsoup
Upgrading libsoup is hardly ever needed
pushd libsoup svn update make $CPUS && sudo make install || (make distclean; PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/evo/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/evo/; make $CPUS && make install) popd
Upgrading gtkhtml
Upgrading gtkhtml is sometimes interesting. Not always. And updating it might make your Evolution look very unstable. Often it's a simple bug in gtkhtml.
pushd gtkhtml svn update make $CPUS && sudo make install || (make distclean; PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2/; make $CPUS && make install) popd
Upgrading evolution-data-server
You want to check for upgrades on evolution-data-server each time you're going to upgrade. As time moves on, lots of the functionality is actually implemented in evolution-data-server and simply being called by evolution using ORBit-2. Most of the times it's functionality that happens in the background or non userinterface related functionality. But there are plans to put some userinterface related things in e-d-s.
The desktop-integration efforts of the last few years caused that a few applications are also using e-d-s. Examples are recent versions of gnomemeeting and the panelapplet Clock. Note that if you make your e-d-s unstable, by installing a bleeding edge SVN version, you're also making other parts of your desktop unstable. But then again, and I repeat myself, thats the way developers like it!
pushd evolution-data-server svn update make $CPUS && make install || (make distclean; PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2; make $CPUS && make install) popd
Upgrade evolution
Since you're going to upgrade, I'm guessing you want to upgrade evolution itself.
pushd evolution svn update make $CPUS && make install || (make distclean; PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ \ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/evo/ --with-openldap=yes \ --enable-nntp=yes --enable-ipv6=yes --enable-test-component=yes \ --enable-nss=yes --enable-smime=yes --enable-plugins=all; make $CPUS && make install) popd
Optionally: Upgrade evolution-exchange
pushd evolution-exchange svn update make $CPUS && sudo make install || (make distclean; PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ \ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2; make $CPUS && make install) popd
Optionally: Upgrade evolution-webcal
pushd evolution-webcal svn update make $CPUS && make install || (make distclean; PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gnome2/lib/pkgconfig/ \ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome2; make $CPUS && make install) popd
Applying Patches
You might want to try out and test some patches from bugzilla.
Complete implementation of category syncing
In order to successfully apply this patch you have to configure pilot-link with --enable-libusb
Running
Normal operation
To run your own Evolution, you probably have to change your bonobo activation config (see list below) to search in your building prefix as well. So just add something like <item>/opt/gnome2/lib/bonobo/servers</item> to the <searchpath> section of your config.
[mbarnes] Or set the environment variable BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH. See above for an example.
Then you can run evolution out of your prefix with
/opt/gnome2/bin/evolution
If you just changed a line of code and want to run evolution with your new changes, but don't want to wait until the make install has finished, then you can try to run Evolution from your SVN top directory
cd ~/svn/gnome2/evolution/; ./shell/.libs/evolution
But note that if you change libraries code (determinable from the Makefile) it's likely that you have to make isntall in order to get the changes active.
Bonobo activation config files are for example
On Gentoo: /etc/bonobo-activation/bonobo-activation-config.xml On Ubuntu feisty: /etc/bonobo-activation/bonobo-activation-config.xml
Debugging
In order to debug Evolution or it's components works just as expected. You can easily attach a running process with e.g. gdb.
Note, that you need to compile Evolution with a debug flag like "-g3" in order to debug it.
Debugging a running Evolution process
gdb -p `pidof evolution`
Debugging a running evolution-data-server process
gdb -p `pidof evolution-data-server`
Create launchers on your panel
I probably don't have to explain how to do this. Nevertheless it's a great idea to force yourself to actually sometimes do a debugging session when that fscking Evolution from cvs is crashing and being very unstable.
~/.gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers $ cat moe-005712dd25.desktop [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Type=Application Exec=gnome-terminal -x /opt/gnome2/bin/evolution TryExec= Icon=gnome-spider.png X-GNOME-DocPath= Terminal=false Name=Debug evolution GenericName=Debug evolution Comment=Debug evolution ~/.gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers $
After starting the debugging session
gdb
If you've set the debugger-variable in the scripts to gdb, you'll have to type "cont" on the prompt in the new terminal. You can press CTRL+C at any time to interrupt the process you're debugging. Once interrupted you can set new breakpoints using "break functionname". You might want to teach yourself how to use gdb from the commandline.
ddd
A graphical userinterface for gdb is ddd. Ddd will show you the sourcecode and you can in the text-viewer set breakpoints and study whats currently in the stack in a graphically fasion.
Others
There's other debuggers that can be used. A very good example, when you're seeking memory problems and memory-leaks, is valgrind.
Note: Since the evolution-data-server is called via bonobo, it's not that easily valgrindable. If anyone knows how to profile the e-d-s it would be nice to write it here.
Making it your default E-mail client
gconftool-2 --set --type string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command "/opt/gnome2/bin/evolution %s"
