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BUILDING.md

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Building j4-dmenu-desktop

Since version r3.0, j4-dmenu-desktop provides two independent build systems: CMake and Meson. CMake is the original build system, Meson has been added in version r3.0.

Both build systems are configured with unity builds by default (see unity builds in Meson for more info about Meson). This is done to speed up release builds, but developers may wish to turn this off.

Although both systems will be supported for compatibility, Meson should be preferred. Meson provides overall better development and packaging experience.

Shell completions are provided as release artifacts. See etc/README.md for more info.

Warning

Meson build system requires Meson >=1.2.0 (as marked in the meson_version field in meson.build). If that isn't available in your build environment, CMake can be used instead.

Dependencies

j4-dmenu-desktop has three dependencies: Catch2, spdlog and fmt. fmt is both a dependency of spdlog and of j4-dmenu-desktop. All of these are internal dependencies and are linked statically (unless the build system is overridden or dependencies are provided externally).

J4-dmenu-desktop also depends on pytest. It is an optional external dependency. It is used for system testing to supplement Catch2 tests. If pytest is not available, pytest tests will be marked as skipped.

The pytest testsuite includes tests for various supported terminal emulators. See tests/system_tests/README.md for more info.

J4-dmenu-desktop won't depend on Catch2 or pytest if tests are disabled.

J4-dmenu-desktop also depends on crazy-complete. It is an optional external dependency. This is true for Meson only, j4-dmenu-desktop's CMake build system currently doesn't support generating completions. See etc/README.md for more info.

Building with CMake

Out-of-source builds are fully supported.

CMake will automatically download Catch2, spdlog and fmt dependencies. If you want to use system installed dependencies instead, can override the mechanism using the following flags:

dependency CMake flag
Catch2 -DWITH_GIT_CATCH=OFF
spdlog -DWITH_GIT_SPDLOG=OFF
fmt -DWITH_GIT_FMT=OFF

If you want to disable dependency fetching altogether, you can use -DNO_DOWNLOAD=ON. This is more future-proof, because it prevents the download of potential new dependencies added to j4-dmenu-desktop.

Tests can be disabled using the -DWITH_TESTS=OFF flag.

Building with Meson

J4-dmenu-desktop provides a simple setup helper meson-setup.sh. It calls meson setup with some preset flags. You can run this script with the -d flag to do a dry run, which just prints the commands it would have executed to stdout. You can then tweak it to your needs using standard Meson flags.

Meson, like CMake, provides several options that tweak the build. In particular, developers may want to set split-source to reduce unnecessary recompilation when building j4-dmenu-desktop and j4-dmenu-tests at the same time1 (meson-setup.sh sets this in its debugging build styles).

Tests can be disabled using the -Denable-tests=false flag.

Although it is recommended to use meson-setup.sh, you can completely ignore its flags and invoke meson manually.

Unity builds in Meson

Unity builds are fully configurable in Meson. They are enabled by default. The meson-setup.sh script disables unity builds for debug and sanitize build styles. You can use Meson's --unity=off flag to turn off unity builds when configuring the project manually.

Support

J4-dmenu-desktop has been tested on glibc and musl, cross compilation has been tested, both g++ and clang++ are able to compile j4-dmenu-desktop without warnings and errors and everything has been tested on FreeBSD. J4-dmenu-desktop should be buildable pretty much everywhere. If not, please submit a new issue.

Footnotes

  1. ccache can be used instead ↩