Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

People often arrive on the #clutter channel ((IRC: irc.gnome.org – join today!)) with troubles building Clutter from SVN: dependencies, installation in non-common prefixes, etc.

Luckily, GNOME has Jhbuild, which is easy to set up ((the wiki page linked has it running in less than ten easy steps)) and also allows custom modulesets for handling dependencies inside a separate root – to avoid messing up your box.

So, if you want to play with Clutter, here’s two Jhbuild modulesets:

• clutter-0.4.modules – for the stable branch of Clutter, if you are developing applications
• clutter-0.6.modules – for the development branch of Clutter, if you want to contribute to Clutter itself, or you want to write bindings for it

Just download the moduleset file of the branch you want to use, copy it into the modulesets directory of the Jhbuild checkout and then:

  jhbuild -m clutter-0.4 build pyclutter

or, if you have a fresh checkout of Jhbuild, simply do:

  jhbuild -m http://folks.o-hand.com/~ebassi/clutter-0.4.modules build pyclutter

thanks to Frederic Peters for fixing remote modulesets and pointing this out

The command lines above will build the stable Python bindings for the stable branch of Clutter, fetching all the needed dependencies. If you’re stuck on some external dependency, though, feel free to drop into #clutter and ask for help ((be sure to specify which distribution you have)).

Update@2007-10-12T17:51+0100: I’ve added the following meta-packages:

• meta-clutter-core, depending on Clutter
• meta-clutter-suite, depending on meta-clutter-core, Clutter-GStreamer, Clutter-GTK+ and Clutter-Cairo
• meta-clutter-python, depending on meta-clutter-suite and PyClutter

You can use the meta-packages to pull in everything you need. As soon as I figure out a way to reliably depend on the other languages runtime environments, I’ll probably add their own meta-packages and a meta-clutter-bindings as well.

Have fun!