Build from BZR

[Michael Rickmann]

Hello everybody,
yesterday I tried to compile ucview and its plugins from the source provided at Lauchpad BZR and ... succeeded. In this forum difficulties have been reported with that. Therefore, I give a short account of what I did to build packages for ubuntu lucid. First of all I made shure to have a basic set of programs installed to download and compile:
sudo apt-get install checkinstall build-essential dh-make devscripts fakeroot patch diff patchutils bzr bzr-gtk
I made a few directories where wanted to place the code, and got it e.g.
mkdir src
cd src
# ### for the libraries:
mkdir unicaplibs-bzr
cd unicaplibs-bzr
bzr init
bzr pull lp:unicap
cd ..
# ### for ucview and its plugins:
mkdir ucview-bzr
cd ucview-bzr
bzr init
bzr pull lp:ucview
cd ..

Now I build and installed the packages libunicap, libucil, libunicapgtk, python-unicap (optinal), ucview, ucview-plugins in that sequence. For each of the packages I did
a) apply any changes to the source I wished/had to make (e.g. cd libunicap ; patch -p1 < ../libunicap.diff )
b) looked at the debian/control file and installed the xx-dev packages needed to build
c) run ./autogen.sh in the package dir. If there were errors another dev package had to be installed.
python-unicap did not need this step.
d) debuild -us -uc will build the package
e) from the parent dir, with administrative rights installed one binary package and a -dev package if present
for the binary prefer the xx2 to the xx-2 ones (e.g. sudo dpkg -i libunicap2_0.9.10_i386.deb libunicap-dev_0.9.10_i386.deb )

Difficulties I had:
1) The newly introduced autogen.sh scripts establish links which conflict with copies done by the debian/rules - they are identical files.
2) In libunicap a --enable-static-cpi switch was introduced which required changes in the parent Makefile.am. The sequence of compilation of the modules had to be adapted to the switch.
3) ucview lacked a debian subdirectory. I pulled in the one from https://launchpad.net/~arne-datafloater/+archive/unicap and fixed it so that the ucview-dev and ucview-asus-icons packages were build.
4) For a system wide install the #include directives of the ucview headers have to specify each other in the form " #include <ucview/uc...h> ". As I do not know into which directioin development goes I fixed that during packaging.
5) ucview-plugins lacked a debian subdirectory. I prepared one mainly by coping/pasting, i.e. its a hack.
To document my changes I try to upload an archive with my diffs. Note that they will not apply in a clean way as development proceeds in BZR. Except for above difficulties they are cosmetic reducing the number of lintian warnings for the debian packages.

The outcome was rather satisfying. From the plugins I only tested the histogram one. I especially like the changes to ucview which allow the movie buttons to be handled intuitively. This morning I repeated the procedure at home doing an amd64 build. The result was equally good as for i386.
Regards
Michael

[arne]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for this excellent writeup! I will try to get the changes in the development branch ASAP.

/Arne

[ThomasM1]

Hi Michael,
Thanks for your post, it helped me to build UCView.

Thomas