gedit/docs/build.md

gedit installation by building the source code

Recommendation to install in a separate prefix

Once you have built gedit from source, you cannot run the application from its build directory: you need to install it with ninja install. For this reason it is highly recommended that you install in a separate prefix instead of overwriting your system binaries.

Note however that when running gedit from a custom prefix you will need to set many environment variables accordingly, for instance PATH and XDG_DATA_DIRS.

There exists several tools that GNOME developers use to take care of all of this. See the Tools section below.

Installation of the dependencies

You need to have all gedit dependencies installed, with recent enough versions. If a dependency is missing or is too old, the build configuration fails (you can try to run the build configuration command for gedit until it succeeds, see the procedure below).

You can install the dependencies by installing packages provided by your operating system, for example on Fedora:

# dnf builddep gedit

But if your version of gedit provided by the OS differs too much from the version of gedit you want to build from source, you'll need to install the new dependencies from source too, and it can become a complicated task if you do it manually.

Also, during gedit development, gedit may depend on a not-yet-released development version of a dependency. So certain dependencies may need to be installed from Git.

That's why if you have difficulties installing recent enough versions of the dependencies, it is usually easier to use one of the tools explained in the next section.

Tools

There are several tools available that take care of the following:

• Install in a separate prefix.
• Build or install dependencies.
• Plus, for some tools: run in a container/sandbox.

GNOME developers usually use one of these tools:

• Toolbx (probably the easiest)
• Or Flatpak
• Or JHBuild

General tips for gedit:

• At the time of writing, no need to build GLib or GTK from source, taking their latest stable versions are sufficient.

JHBuild tips:

• Try ignore_suggests = True in your jhbuildrc to have fewer dependencies to build (see the difference with "jhbuild list gedit"). Another solution is to put some modules in the skip variable in jhbuildrc.
• Note that the moduleset for gedit may be out-of-date.

Building the gedit module manually

If you use one of the above tools, you don't need all the explanations in this section. But it can be instructive.

gedit uses the Meson build system.

Once the dependencies are installed, here are simple procedures to finally build the gedit module from source.

Installation onto the system

Warning: this procedure doesn't install in a separate prefix, so it may overwrite your system binaries.

$ cd build/
$ meson setup                # Build configuration
$ ninja                      # Build
[ Become root if necessary ]
$ ninja install              # Installation

Installation in a separate prefix

Just change the above meson setup command by:

$ meson setup --prefix /an/other/path