Running a development version of Gramps
The following describes one possible scenario for getting the latest development version of Gramps running:
- install a recent version of Ubuntu (eg. 7.10) or some other linux distribution. Here we will assume Ubuntu and give the install commands (apt-get) for that distribution
- (Beyond the scope of this article, but VirtualBox and VMWare provide a great and relatively easy solution to getting an independent and/or clean build environment.)
- install some basic build tools
sudo apt-get install build-essential
- install a text editor if you plan on modifying the Gramps source. You can use Gedit, kate, or dedicated software like sourcenav (sudo apt-get sourcenav), erik4, SPE or even Eclipse with python plugin. Follow the Programming Guidelines.
- create a directory for the Gramps source
cd ~ mkdir gramps cd gramps
- get the latest copy of GRAMPS
sudo apt-get install subversion svn co https://gramps.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gramps/trunk
- get ready to build GRAMPS
cd trunk ./autogen.sh
- if you get a failure about gnome-common, install it:
sudo apt-get install gnome-common ./autogen.sh
- if you get a failure about glib-gettext.m4, install it:
sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev ./autogen.sh
- build GRAMPS
make
- run Gramps, note that you need Python 2.5 to run the current development code. Check the README file for details.
python2.5 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 python2.5 src/gramps.py
It might happen constants have been changed, and you obtain an error on the const.py module. In that case, rerun autogen.sh and the make command.