Making a debian package of Inkscape on Ubuntu Hardy
July 3rd, 2008 by heathenxAlright…this is going to be a little rough and not quite as thorough as I would like but I wanted to document it now while it was fresh in my mind. After visiting this site and this site I was able to cobble some steps together to build a debian package of a recent Inkscape development release for Ubuntu Hardy. This may not work for everyone but it worked for me and I was able to use the deb package on a newly installed version of Ubuntu Hardy to make sure it worked.
Here are the steps that I took:
1.) Install the necessary packages to build Inkscape (some tools may not be needed)
sudo apt-get install autotools-dev fakeroot dh-make build-essential autoconf automake intltool libglib2.0-dev libpng12-dev libgc-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libxslt1-dev libboost-dev libpopt-dev libgsl0ldbl libgsl0-dev libgsl0-dbg libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-dev libssl-dev libmagick++9-dev libwpg-dev
2.) Download a recent devel tarball from Inkscape Subversion Snapshots
save inkscape-XXXXX.tar.bz2 to /home/user dir.
3.) Untar inkscape-XXXXX.tar.bz2 to /home/user. This will make a new dir called inkscape-XXXX
4.) Make the debian control files:
dh_make --createorig
Pick Single for single binary
Fill in any extra information like maintainer and version
5.) Run the following:
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
If everything goes as planned and after a long wait you should get:
inkscape_XXXXXX-1_i386.deb in your /home/user dir.
I haven’t yet figured out how to install this package or prepare it to run along side the stable 0.46 release. If anyone knows how then please give me a jingle.
Here’s my deb package of Inkscape 0.46+devel revision 19107, July 2, 2008:
Use it at your own risk and don’t bitch at me if it doesn’t work. You can always uninstall it and go back to the stable release. I am really looking forward to Inkscape 0.47. They are woring on some really neat features like Spiro, Live Path Effects and Filter Effects. Check it out. 
By the way, this was my first deb package. I didn’t adhere to the Debian package standards.
July 5th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Here is how I do this:
1. Create directory where compilation will take place, sth like ~/temp/, and cd to that dir
2. run “svn co https://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/inkscape/inkscape/trunk”
3. cd to ~/temp/inkscape and run “./autogen.sh”
4. Run ./configure
5. Edit inkscape.spec:
- change “Name” from “inkscape” to “inkscape-svn” (so package will be installed next to stable inkscape release)
- make sure there are no spaces/tabs between fileds names and values (those coused some problems when using checkinstall)
6. Run “checkinstall” as root/fakeroot (if you do this as user, checkisntall will create package , but permissions for all files in this package will be set to read/write for user, which is not a good idea if prefix is /usr/local (default))
7. Package will be automaticly installed and stored in current dir
7. To run inkscape from svn: /usr/local/bin/inkscape
8. To run stable inkscape from repo: /usr/bin/inkscape, or just inkscape
And btw, there is already one guy who creates debian packages every week from current svn, I don’t know if his repo is trusworthy, but should should work under ubuntu: http://art.sidux.com
July 5th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
AWESOME! Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.
Btw, I was able to compile another one this morning. I think it was revision 19185.
July 6th, 2008 at 9:32 am
@Inkscaper
I was messing around with dh_make and discovered the man page for it. I can set the package name to “inkscape-svn” like you are doing in the inkscape.spec file. Here is what I am doing now:
Before:
dh_config –createorig
Now:
dh_make –createorig –single –packagename inkscape-svn
or
dh_make -r -s -p inkscape-svn (just a shorter version of the above)
I’m re-compiling now and hopefully I’ll be able to have both stable and svn versions installed.
Btw, I did check out art.sidux.com repo but I’m afraid to use them. Since those are built for Debian Sid are they ok to use for Ubuntu Hardy? I’m thinking about hosting my deb packages too. I’m not interested in setting up a repo though. Maybe Richard and I can put that somewhere on our web site.