Compiling and Installing Using CMake and Scribus 1.3.3.6+ and 1.3.4+

Compiling and Installing using CMake and Scribus 1.3.3.6 and 1.3.4 or higher

After many years of using the autotools build system, the developers of Scribus have selected CMake as a replacement system. It provides a much more flexible setup with a lot less complexity. It also provides compatibility with build tools on Linux and variants of Unix, Windows and Mac OS X.

To build with the CMake build system you will of course need CMake itself. Most Linux and some Unix distributions provide it as a standard package. If not, please download it, make sure you get a recent version, like 2.4.3 or higher. Mac OS X users can also find installers there, as well as, getting it from macports.org. Scribus does not yet use CMake for Windows, although this may be added in the future.

One of the advantages of CMake is that we can build "out of source". By creating a separate directory where the program is being being compiled, the temporary files and resulting application files are not stored in the same location as the Scribus source files. This helps keep directory structures clean and will also reduce the download time for updating your source tree a little. This is the preferred method and strongly recommended by our developers. CMake is also much simpler to maintain for developers and errors can be understood by mere mortals.

Preparation

Let's assume the following:

Starting an Out-of-Source Build

Change to the source directory:

cd /home/username/scribussource/

Make a directory to build Scribus in:

mkdir builddir

Change to the build directory:

cd builddir

Then run:

/usr/bin/cmake ../Scribus -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/username/scribusinstall/

If this is the build location you have chosen, please skip down to the Build Stage section

Continuing onto the Build Stage

Once the CMake command you have chosen above has completed successfully (remember it needs to find the dependencies of Scribus and record their locations), then you need to run:

make && make install

Advanced Options

Build Options

Some options that the Scribus CMake files know about (more to come!):

For example: to make a cairo debug build, then something like this (all on one line):

/usr/bin/cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/username/scribusinstall
         -DWANT_CAIRO=1 -DWANT_DEBUG=1 -DWANT_VERSIONING=1

Specifying Library Locations

Whenever your distribution releases their package for a library Scribus depends on, it may still not be the very latest stable or unstable version from the writers of the library. In some cases, the Scribus developers have had to rely on the very latest code to further some parts of Scribus. In this case it is necessary to build your own version of such a library.

To specify a new cairo install path, other than your system's default add this to the cmake command line: -DPREFIX_CAIRO:PATH=/path/to/your/cairo/install

When your system has both Qt3 and Qt4 installed

Systems with both Qt3 and Qt4 installed: You have uic and moc from Qt4 in the path and it may result in a compilation failure. This should NOT be the case with CMake 2.4.2 and higher, or when using current Scribus SVM. However, this might be a useful workaround:

Remove cached options from previous cmake configuration run from your build location: rm CMakeCache.txt

Then change PATH variable. For example, on my Gentoo box:

export PATH=/usr/qt/3/bin/:$PATH

Rerun the cmake configuration phase:

/usr/bin/cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/username/scribusinstall/

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

/usr/bin/cpack -G TBZ2 --config CPackSourceConfig.cmake

to give you a bundle of the source.

Important: If you need to re-run cpack remove the _CPack_Packages/ before running this a second time.

You can also use svn export

/path/to/scribus/svn
in a temporary directory and then tar or zip the directory to create a tarball.

Troubleshooting and Success Stories

If after reading these instructions through and you still have issues, please join us on IRC or post a mail to our mailing list with specifics of your problem. We also are interested in hearing from folks who have successfully compiled Scribus on non-Linux platforms too. We know it is very reliable on Mac OS X as well.