Running a development version of Gramps

The following describes one possible scenario for building and running the latest development version of GRAMPS on Ubuntu:

Note It is beyond the scope of this document, but VirtualBox and VMWare provide a great and relatively easy solution to getting a clean build environment up and running within 30 minutes on Linux.

Example on VirtualBox

This picture shows a parallel installation on the same machine of both the svn version (running on a virtual machine) and the latest stable version. On the left hand side you can see Gramps 3.3.0-0 SVN 16310 running with Python 2.7.1, BSDDB 4.8.4 and Linux kernel 2.6.37 on Ubuntu Natty 11.04 alfa; on the right hand side you can see Gramps 3.2.5-1 with Python 2.6.6, BSDDB 4.7.3 and Linux kernel 2.6.35. The svn version is installed locally and running in a virtual machine on Oracle VM 4.0.0 r69151. The svn version was installed locally on the user home directory. Running the autogen script with --prefix=/home/user without make nor make install. I only ran the msgfmt to get the Dutch translation and copied the gramps.mo file to ../trunk/po/local/LC_MESSAGES/ and ran Gramps with the GRAMPSI18N=~/trunk/po python gramps.py in dir ~/trunk/src.

• Install a recent version of Ubuntu. The steps in this document have been tested with Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, 10.04 and 10.10.

• Install a text editor if you plan on modifying the GRAMPS source. You can use any text editor such as gedit, kate, or sourcenav (sudo apt-get install sourcenav), erik4, SPE, or Eclipse with the python plugin. Instructions on installing and configuring Eclipse for GRAMPS development. Note the programming guidelines for GRAMPS.

• Install the tools we will need:

sudo apt-get install build-essential gnome-common libglib2.0-dev subversion gettext

• Create a directory for the Gramps source:

cd ~
mkdir gramps
cd gramps

• Get the latest version of GRAMPS:

svn co https://gramps.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gramps/trunk

• Get ready to build GRAMPS:

cd trunk
./autogen.sh

• Build GRAMPS:

make

• Run Gramps:

python src/gramps.py

At this point, any time you want to update to the latest version of Gramps, simply run:

cd ~/gramps/trunk
svn update
python src/gramps.py

If some of the GRAMPS constants have changed and you obtain an error in const.py, rerun the commands autogen.sh and make.