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CVS Is Not That Scary

or Build Your Stable GIMP from CVS

Contributers: Branko Collins, Rodney Dawes, Will Lashell, Roger Leigh, Mitch Natterer, Sven Neumann, Raphaël Quinet, Manish Singh, Nathan C. Summers, Jeff Trefftz, Lourens Veen, Rebecca J. Walter, Chris Want, (and Kirstens grandparents).

This document assumes you are working with a fresh gimp-2.2 cvs checkout as described in the CVS Is Not That Scary or Get Your Stable GIMP from CVS how to.

Check Your Build Tools

First of all, it is best that you have some experience building The GIMP from a tarball, but of course is not required. A list of the tools you need to build your gimp-2.2 cvs tree can always be found in HACKING in the root directory of your cvs tree. Here is the current list (probably they will not change for this gimp):

• GNU autoconf 2.54
• GNU automake 1.7
• GNU libtool 1.4
• GNU gettext 0.13

To check to see which versions you have (if any), type into a term: autoconf --version. This should tell if you have the package and if it is the default. typing auto<tab> into a term can reveal other versions. For instance, GNU automake-1.7 is my default automake, but using the tab as described (in many shells) revealed that i also have an automake-1.4 installed as well. Make certain that you have these tools before you go on.

Define your GIMP Build Environment

Building The GIMP requires more knowledge of the paths to your software than the typical *nix shell knows about. The following instructions and scripts assume a shell that accepts "export" (as bash does). Users of other shells can try "setenv" instead.

Just two additional paths need to be added to the environment to make the build tools happy to build The GIMP: $ACLOCAL_FLAGS and $PKG_CONFIG_PATH. There are two ways to do this presented in this document. The second one is the nicest.

In an attempt to make this as pastable as possible, into a terminal type export PRE="<prefix-location>" where the <prefix-location> is replaced with the proper location. Usually /usr/local. As an example: export PRE="/usr/local". Now it should be easy to paste the following two lines:

export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I $PRE/share/aclocal".

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$PRE/lib/pkgconfig:$PGK_CONFIG_PATH".

That should be enough to make a gimp build environment for this login shell. However, I have had a much nicer life since i started to use this little script written by Rebecca J. Walter. gimpenv. it does the work described above. simply save it somewhere and using the login shell you will build gimp in, type source gimpenv and the paths are magically set for you.

./autogen.sh, The First Challenge

First you should determine your configure options. You feed them to autogen.sh just like you do configure. autogen.sh feeds them to configure, actually. One option that you might use is --disable-print unless you are certain that gimp-print is installed there. Time to type in the term: ./autogen.sh --disable-print

Some of the autogen spew can be misleading:

Please add the files
  codeset.m4 gettext.m4 glibc21.m4 iconv.m4 isc-posix.m4 lcmessage.m4
  progtest.m4
from the /usr/share/aclocal directory to your autoconf macro directory
or directly to your aclocal.m4 file.
You will also need config.guess and config.sub, which you can get from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/config/.

This is something that configure finds. autogen.sh is simply telling you that it is stupid. Ignore this.

Now configure starts, and from this point on, building the cvs checkout -r gimp-1-2 gimp should be the same as the tarball. For instance, I got that old Parse::RecDescent Notice. This is a familiar configure error that I would have gotten while building the tarball.

Now type 'make' to compile GIMP.