Re: Sigil

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Sat, 23 Aug 2014 23:42:16 -0700 (PDT)
Rusi Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, August 23, 2014 8:30:01 PM UTC+5:30, Steve Litt wrote:
> > Hi all,
> 
> > If any of you writes ePubs, you're probably familiar with Sigil, at
> > least for partial conversions and touchups. But if you haven't used
> > Sigil for awhile, you might not be aware that it's really grown up
> > in the past two years, to the point where it's a reasonable ePub
> > authoring environment. 
> 
> Thanks for the info.
> However compiling from source seems to be a major project
> How are you installing?

I'm glad you mentioned that, Rusi.

The latest and greatest, 0.7.4, demands qt5. Ummm, no. Not on Wheezy,
not now, at least.

So I just downloaded 0.6.2, the last version that is satisfied with
qt4.8, and compiled and installed it according to the instructions. 

Here are some generalized tips for compiling 0.6.2 specifically:

* Install cmake, 2.8.0 or better
* You might need to install some -dev packages: errors will tell you
* mkdir -p ~/sigil-0.6.2/src; cd ~/sigil-0.6.2; mkdir run; mkdir build
* cd ~/sigil-0.6.2/build
	NOTE: This qualifies as a folder *outside* the source
	  distribution as discussed in INSTALL.txt
* cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release $HOME/sigil-0.6.2/src

* cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/sigil-0.6.2/src \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release $HOME/sigil-0.6.2/run

* make
* make install

Note that the preceding make install puts the executables in
$HOME/sigil-0.6.2/run, which seems to be the "sigilesque" way of doing
things. No sudo required on the make install, and deinstalling the
whole thing is a matter of rm -rf $HOME/sigil-0.6.2/run.

You access $HOME/sigil-0.6.2/run/bin/sigil with the following
shellscript:

=========================================
#!/bin/bash
$HOME/sigil-0.6.2/run/bin/sigil $@
=========================================

Obviously, if this is a sigil installation meant to serve many users,
you'd probably leave out the cmake line that forced it to
$HOME/sigil-0.6.2/run/, and do your make install as root.

The instructions in INSTALL.txt aren't all that good. The phrase
"/path/to/extracted/folder" is ambiguous and undefined, but it means
the src directory. They tell you about changing the make install
destination *after* telling you to make install, doohhhhh! By the way,
you change the destination after a failed (because normal user can't
write to /opt or whatever) make install, and do another make install,
and it will work just fine.

Like most Open Source problems, difficulty installing Sigil isn't
defective code or defective packaging, it's defective documentation.

Once you understand what INSTALL.txt is really saying, installing a
Sigil requiring the qt version you already have is pretty easy.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance