How to compile glade from trunk

Question

The text edit button for glade doesn't work and I read in another link that I need to compile glade from 'trunk'. I don't know what that is, how do I compile glade from trunk and where do I go to get trunk.

Answer 1

Trunk is a term used in version control systems (VCS/RCS). A VCS contains the source code for one or more projects. This is referred to as a source tree. If there are many programmers working on the same code, it's often easier and safer for them to make changes to separate snapshots of the source tree, and then merge their modified snapshots back into the main codebase. Or, in VCS parlance, you create a branch, make changes, and then merge them back into the main codebase - known as trunk.

So trunk typically means the latest copy of the codebase; what an outsider would consider to be the latest code for the project. It's more complicated in DVCS systems, but I'll gloss over that.

It's important to understand that trunk is where developers are committing their changes to right now.

Nightly builds are generally more stable than trunk, tags more stable than nightly builds, beta releases more stable than tags, and stable releases more stable than beta releases. In other words, trunk is about as unstable it gets, and hence not in any way guaranteed to work. It might not even build.

You say you are encountering a bug in glade, and this is why you want to build trunk. It is true the version of glade in the main repo has some bugs at present, e.g. in the inability to edit checkbox label text. But you can work around these quite easily in code, or directly in the glade xml file.

Generally, you don't want to be building and running trunk unless you have a good reason to do so (e.g. you're developing glade, or you've encountered issues fixed in trunk that you cannot work around), and are prepared to encounter, investigate, work around (and possibly report/fix) numerous bugs.

If you can't stand working around this bug, whatever it is, a better solution might be to try the version of glade in Ubuntu's proposed repository to see if your problem is fixed there. I suggest you go down one of these routes.

For the sake of completeness, compiling the latest glade codebase would go something like this.

sudo apt-get install git
sudo apt-get build-dep glade
mkdir glade-src && cd glade-src
git clone git://git.gnome.org/glade
cd glade

To compile glade, refer to the INSTALL file provided. You'll need something like this, although you may well run into difficulty depending on the state of trunk at the time of your checkout.

autoconf
./configure
make

It can then be installed into the default location with

sudo make install

but you'd probably want to either adjust the target location to put it under /usr/local/.., or just run it from the bin dir as-is.